A: Now of course, the subject of reincarnation as it is usually understood, refers to people who die and are reborn again. Well, of course you can understand that reincarnation would have no such meaning with us for the simple reason that we have come to the knowledge that no one ever dies, so they can’t be reborn.
Reincarnation has an entirely different meaning here. It really means that we live many, many lives – and we do. We live many, many lives. I have lived twenty-two years as a businessman, and that was one of my lives. I died to that man and I died to that life, and I was reborn. And I was reborn as a healer practitioner. For sixteen years, I did nothing but sit in an office and do healing work. Then evidently I died again, and I was reborn into this Infinite Way, where healing and teaching and lecturing and revealing became a whole new life.
When I died to the business world, everybody in that world died away from me. Not one single individual came over from my social or business life into my Christian Science life. And when I died to the Christian Science life, ninety-nine out of a hundred people that I knew in Christian Science died too, so far as I was concerned, and did not come over into The Infinite Way life.
So The Infinite Way life has been a whole new rebirth, and you are part of it. Do you see that?
Who is to say that I am not going to have a fourth life, and a fifth one, and a sixth one? I am positive that I will. I am positive that I will die to this particular activity of lecturing, teaching, and healing, and will then find myself living a life on a different plane of consciousness. I may still be here and be visible, or I may depart and be invisible. But in either case, I’m going to die again and I’m going to be reborn again. Probably many of those who are with me today will die away from me when I die, so that in my next life, whatever form it may be – here on earth or on the so-called “next plane” – I may have to find a whole new circle of friends and co-workers. I don’t know and you don’t know.
But let us be sure of this: we all die. We died to our youth. We died to rattles and play toys. Later we died to schoolbooks. We have all died out of one life after another and been reborn into a higher form of life. We died out of youth into parenthood, which is a different life than the youth life. So it is that we are always dying and we are always being reborn, but we never die in the sense that the world means “die.” We never experience death. We never experience extinction. We pass from glory to glory. Just as we passed from childhood to youth, and youth to parenthood, and parenthood to the present stage of development, so we pass from glory to glory, each one better than the other. In this knowledge, you can never experience death. Some day you will experience the passing from the visible scene to the invisible, but you will quickly find it isn’t death.
1 This excerpt is from Recording 704B: 1955 Johannesburg Closed Class, “Spiritual Breakfast, the Nature of God, Prayer and Meditation, continued.” It is posted with kind permission from the Estate of Joel Goldsmith, which holds the copy protection on the recorded classes and the copyright on the transcripts. The full transcript of this recording is available from The Infinite Way Office website or by calling 1-800-922-3195.