why we incarnate

Imagine you are from a place in which the most exquisitely beautiful music ever created plays. The music is rapturous, resplendent. As long as you have lived, you have always heard it. It has never been absent, nor has any other music been present. One day you realize that because you've always heard it, you have never really heard it. That is, you have never really known it because you have never heard anything else. you decide, therefore, that you would like to know the music truly. How might you accomplish this?

One way would be to go to a place where the music of Home does not exist. Perhaps a different music plays, a music that contains jarring notes or strident passages. This contrast would instill within you a new appreciation of the music you always heard at Home.

A second way would be to go to a place where the music of Home does not exist and recreate it from memory. The experience of composing those magnificent sounds would give you an even deeper understanding of their beauty.

A third possibility exists, one that is much more challenging but that holds the greatest promise. It occurs to you that a truly profound way of knowing can be gained by going to a place where the music of Home does not play and once there recreating it but only after you have forgotten what it sounded like. The experience of remembering and then composing the extraordinary symphonies of Home would produce the richest, fullest, and most expanded knowing of their inherent grandeur.

And so bravely you travel to the world that offers the third option. There you hear music that you, lacking memory, believe to be the only music you've ever heard. Some songs are lovely, but many strike your ears as dissonant. These harsh tones foster within you a desire - and ultimately a resolve - to create original music.

Soon you begin to write your own compositions. At first you are distracted by the loud music of your new world. Over time, however, as you turn away from the external blare and listen to the melodies in your heart, your musical creations grow in beauty. Eventually you compose a masterpiece, and when it is finished you remember something: the masterpiece you wrote is the very same music that you had played at Home. And this recollection triggers yet another: You are that music. It is not something you heard outside yourself; rather it was you, and you were it. And by creating yourself in a new place, you now know yourself - truly know yourself - in a way that was not possible had you never left Home.

- "Courageous Souls" by Robert Schwartz