The central lesson of reincarnation is not to celebrate the soul’s rebirth in a new human form, but rather to stop the soul’s obsessive need to be reborn entirely, by working out all the karma of our past lives. But why should the goal of all human life be to stop the wheel of reincarnation and get off it forever? Never more to need to be reborn? It would seem that no concept could be more rejecting of life; that this Hindu/Buddhist doctrine, if taken to its logical conclusion, would advocate the obliteration of the human race through its dissolution. Can the Eastern wisdom really be so much the opposite of life-affirming? At least at first to the average Westerner, this appears to be a big puzzle.
Nevertheless, one important clue is that the Eastern teachings stress the importance of the evolution of the individual soul. Each soul is slowly evolving forward, however fitfully, toward a state in which it finds maya-delusion no longer to appeal. Of all the peoples in the world, no two souls are at the exact same state of evolution at any one time. Thus, because one individual soul is ready to step off the wheel of reincarnation and out of the world of material things, that does not mean that all of his brothers and sisters are equally prepared or evolved. One could visualize the process as a giant escalator–a “stairway to heaven”–on which the entire human race is slowly climbing. One by one, an individual arrives at the top step and willingly steps off entirely, forever into the One-ness of Spirit. His brothers and sisters are all arrayed behind him in a ranking of relative preparedness to climb off. Some souls, moving more quickly up through their repeating lives, pass others to the left as they climb. Others are just entering at the bottom, one by one. It is perhaps in this way that life perpetuates itself even as a few human souls eventually evolve toward the One-ness of God.
There is a life-affirming aspect to this conceptualization after all. It is that until one is really, truly ready to transfer his love from his fellow humans directly to their source in God (a love which extends its embrace to enfold all of those humans within it,) those lesser forms of human love are richly deserving of the greatest possible honor and celebration on Earth. The Hindu masters so vividly described in Yogananda’s “Autobiography” continue to love their disciples dearly even as they devote themselves to God. It is as if they subtly transform their love of individual human beings from a direct love of the person into a love of that person as representing an emanation or specific manifestation of God.
Bird of Spirit 
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