QA218 QUESTION: I would like guidance for the spiritual meaning for me of my mentally retarded twin daughter.
ANSWER: If you take this as a form of punishment, it would be very difficult for you to accept yourself. Perhaps it is easier for you to accept the fact of it – the child itself – rather than yourself. I would say that there are, of course, very obviously karmic conditions that have existed in other lifetimes in which this entity has allowed herself to get away from herself, over and over and over, and therefore has lost touch with herself to a considerable degree.
If getting away from the self is carried on and on and on, and more and more of that happens, an incarnation is bound to occur in which the contact with the inner self, with the reality of life, is being completely lost. The only way I could constructively speak about this now is to say that this entity, in another appearance on this Earth, has given you a lot. You felt the urge to give her in this time, and have made the commitment to take on human guardianship in this life.
This is what I have to say. Can you connect with that?
QUESTION: No! Because I’m more in contact with the part of me that wants to take rather than give.
ANSWER: Well, you have given her already in the sense that you wanted to be her mother before you came. You could not have such a child if you would not have agreed to such a condition.
QUESTION: My reality here has been that I have not wanted to be her mother.
ANSWER: That is another part of you. But find that part which is much deeper and in which you did want that, in which you had received help in very different circumstances. You can find this part, perhaps best, if you consider how you react today toward people who give you love and kindness. You are always urged to give, to want to give. Are you not? {Yes} It is the same here. That attitude exists in you, and it is operative and behind this connection.
QA257 QUESTION: In my work with handicapped and environmentally deprived infants, two issues continue to disturb and confuse me. I do not understand the task of the severely impaired child – a child who is not capable of ever understanding or choosing anything, including such basics as choosing to eat. Does lack of cognition thwart spiritual development? Are these souls developing spiritually or are they the undeveloped souls that you spoke of in the November 15 lecture [Lecture #255 The Birthing Process – Cosmic Pulse]? Are these souls choosing God in some way that is not obvious to me?
Also, many of the families that I see are involved in deep chronic poverty, physical violence towards one another, and hopelessness about their situations. I realize they must be choosing this on some level. Yet, when their life experience has been so limited as to hinder awareness of how to choose other alternatives, how can they be held responsible for this intent?
As I write these questions, I can see my desire to absolve these individuals from personal responsibility and view them only as victims of life. I appreciate and thank you for your insight into these matters and into my involvement with these individuals.
ANSWER: As to number one, these souls – the impaired children – are born with the carryover of attitudes they have harbored for many incarnations. These attitudes, to put it as simply as possible, were to not use their minds, their thinking, and to deliberately blot out their own light of consciousness. Thus, they extinguished the light.
These intentionalities are quite deliberate at one time. Although after a while this choice is no longer conscious, it does not alter the fact. The inevitable results of choices must come to pass. It is as if a muscle is deliberately not being used, over and over again. After a while the limb atrophies. When the result is being suffered, it is up to the individual to learn from the experience, to search for understanding and meaning, so as to correct the faulty choice.
One cannot always derive the benefit of painful experience right away – often not in the same life manifestation – especially in a case where consciousness has been thwarted by self-choice. But the entity has the possibility to learn in his or her spirit existence. In your terms, this may appear to be after incarnation has been completed. And, indeed, this is often also the case.
However, it does not only happen afterwards. It is also simultaneous, in that the spirit exists in full awareness while the body struggles with present hindrances. The benefit on the manifesting self can often appear only later, as it were, although the benefit actually already exists all the while.
The spirit may recognize the consequences of a previous choice, but the bodily impairment simply has to take its course. Your knowing and understanding this will be helpful, simply as a question of what you communicate in your vibrations. Whatever little light of consciousness you can help instill will be that much more helpful.
As to number two – the chronic poverty in families – you are still battling with the victim syndrome. Again, as in the first part of your question, their conditions are a result, not a cause. If poverty consciousness, anger, rage and blaming lead to violence rather than to recognition and change, of course it is accurate to state that such an attitude is usually the result of a still-under-developed state of consciousness. However, whether or not this is so, results always need to take their course.
The entity has to learn that other choices are available, no matter when this point of enlightenment will come. It is one of the great human illusions to confound and reverse cause and effect. And this is what you still are doing here. You will be infinitely more helpful in your charges – and also more loving, strange as this may seem – when you see things in their proper perspective.
