The general teaching is that male and female incarnations alternate from one life to the next. Can you clarify this point?
The Guide: Fundamentally, each being is male or female, and in most incarnations the entities follow their basic nature. However, in some cases it is necessary to experience incarnating as the other sex. Let me explain. Before the Fall – the separation from God – all beings were unified, encompassing within themselves both the active and receptive, that is, male and female aspects.
You all know that ultimately unification must happen and the separated halves will come together and form one being. This happens only after the necessity to incarnate has been overcome – often even much later, when the male and female elements have become one.
The Fall is the separation from the one, from God, and at the same time a breaking into two followed by many further splits and fragmentations. This explains the origin of the animal, plant and mineral kingdoms. There the splits extend further and further into smaller and smaller parts. This, however, is an additional explanation.
Returning to your question, imagine the unified being, in which the male and female parts are integrated, in the shape of a ball – but please do not take this too literally. I cannot present this otherwise, because if I tried, you would lack the concepts and I the words. One side of the ball is the positive, masculine principle, the other the negative, feminine principle – and I ask you not to take the word “negative” as a value judgment. The male element is the creator, the positive, active principle. When God, with the purpose of active creation, contracts into form, then the masculine principle is at work.
The feminine, receptive principle, is what dissolves itself, slowly and continuously building, growing. It exists in nature as the mothering principle which does not create with one act but is continuously affecting everything, and that simply rests in its being.
Both principles can be found in endless diversity in all creative manifestations. Consequently, they can also be found in the integrated twin entities in which both the male and female poles are contained. God has created them both in perfection, each in its own essence. Therefore, it is not right for the male principle to take on female functions, and vice versa.
Think back again to the ball. One side is the positive, masculine principle, the other side the negative, feminine principle. When they are brought into unity, they both work in complete harmony. As the splitting took place, the halves were rarely split apart exactly in the middle.
The breaking apart was the result of the separation from God, and this was a chaotic event which did not belong in God’s perfect order. As a result, the break did not occur either in an orderly fashion. Therefore the fault could apportion to the feminine part what should be masculine, and vice versa, in an arbitrary fashion.
In the development that takes the spirits back to God, the split has to even out. What belongs to the masculine principle, but has gone over to the feminine side, has to incarnate in the opposite side, that is, as a man. The more irregular the splitting, the more often the entity has to incarnate as a man to establish the original balance.
If you knew how many incarnations you lived as a male or a female, you would know in what manner your splitting occurred. To repeat: every being represents fundamentally either the male or the female principle, and either the one or the other dominates his or her being. It would not make sense for the healthy and harmonious feminine to change over to the masculine, for both are divine, and each in its own way is perfect.
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