Reincarnation and recurrence are cosmic laws describing the journey of a spiritual essence or soul through successive physical bodies.
The difference is that recurrence is a mechanical unconscious process, and reincarnation is a conscious process.
Recurrence is for those without the fully developed solar vehicles and conscious center of gravity, that is, most of us.
Reincarnation is for the masters who incarnate on Earth to fulfill specific purposes, and in accordance with divine will.
Reincarnation
“Indeed, the word reincarnation is very demanding. Let us remember the ten reincarnations of Vishnu, the Cosmic Christ. Krishna, the great Hindu Avatar, born about one thousand years before Christ, never said that all of the intellectual animals that populate the face of the Earth reincarnate; he only emphatically affirmed that those who reincarnate are the Buddhas, the great Gods, the Devas, the divine Kings, etc. Therefore, let us penetrate into the study of the law of reincarnation in a more detailed manner. We can state with completely dazzling clarity that reincarnation is impossible for those who do not possess sacred individuality.”
-Samael Aun Weor, Yes there is a Hell, Devil, and Karma
Recurrence
“This is the Law of Recurrence: everything occurs the same way it occurred plus the sum of its results.”
–Samael Aun Weor
While the investigation into past lives is certainly interesting, often we find simply the lessons of repetition, our habits of the past which have created our current circumstances. Every day is a miniature of our whole life. And every lifetime is a miniature of our entire existence. The past can continue to repeat indefinitely, or we can struggle against our desires and work to resolve our karma.
“A man is what his life is. If a man does not modify anything within him, if he does not transform his life radically, if he doesn’t work on himself, he is wasting his time miserably.”
–Samael Aun Weor
“If you want to know your past life, look at your present condition. If you want to know your future life, look at your present actions.”
-Padmasambhava
What we think is our past will be our future, because everything in the universe is in a cycle. Our positive and negative values return, our lives will be the same. The spiral line of life will repeat, but in elevated or degenerated spirals, and the consequences of our actions change our next recurrence.
Return
The cosmic law of Return is also helpful to study and reflect on.
Everything returns.
Water appears as rain, river, steam and clouds.
The Earth shifts and mountains grow, only to crumble away.
Fire burns and renews the forest, providing fuel for future fires.
The seasons return each year.
Everything in nature is returning, which means that we, or rather, the essence, also returns. If you know how to wait, everything will come back.
“At the end, we all have been the mother of all others. “ –Buddha
“As a person puts on new garments, giving up old ones, similarly, the soul accepts new material bodies, giving up the old and useless ones.”
-Bhagavad Gita
“And the disciples asked him, ‘Then why do the scribes say that Elijah must come?’ He answered, ‘Elijah does come, and he will restore all things. But I tell you that Elijah has already come, and they did not recognize him, but did to him whatever they pleased. So also the Son of Man will certainly suffer at their hands.’ Then the disciples understood that he was speaking to them of John the Baptist.”
-Matthew 17:10-13
“Truly I say unto you that among those who are born of women there has never risen one greater than John the Baptist; …for all the prophets and the law prophesied until John. And if you wish to accept it, he is Elijah who was to come. He who has ears to hear, let him hear.”
-Matthew 11:9
“Well, I said, I will tell you a tale; not one of the tales which Odysseus tells to the hero Alcinous, yet this too is a tale of a hero, Er the son of Armenius, a Pamphylian by birth. He was slain in battle, and ten days afterwards, when the bodies of the dead were taken up already in a state of corruption, his body was found unaffected by decay, and carried away home to be buried. And on the twelfth day, as he was lying on the funeral pile, he returned to life and told them what he had seen in the other world.”
-Plato, The Myth of Er
“A certain class of repetition can happen in the natural order of things, like the repetition of the summers, of the winters or other seasons…the movement of celestial bodies and the phenomenon they produce belong to this order of things, such are the solstices and the equinoxes, that are produced by the movement of the Sun. But if we should believe the Pythagoreans, there is another kind of repetition. That means that in the future I will talk to you and I will sit exactly this same way, and I will have in my hand the same stick, and everything will be the same as now; and time, as we suppose, will be the same, because if the movements of celestial bodies and of other things are the same, what occurred before and what will occur later is always the same.”
-Eudemus, a disciple of Aristotle
“The Celts were fearless warriors because they wish to inculcate this as one of their leading tenets, that souls do not become extinct, but pass after death from one body to another.”
-Julius Caesar