Steve, yes, I was thinking about it just yesterday. The long game. One incarnation is just one tiny amount of the evolutionary process we go through in our human lives.
It is probably so that only highly evolved ones achieve a stable state of God-awareness, sometimes even ultra-evolved souls may skip an incarnation or two and go without uplifting spiritual experiences.
It may also be that the living presence of the guru may be necessary to overcome karmic states of restlessness which prevent us to experience superconscious states in a specific incarnation.
Anyway, again, it is a long game, what we sow remains in the ground and we are going to reap eventually the result of our efforts.
Often highly evolved souls play other roles to satisfy certain worldly missions and dramas. Most of the elevated spiritual experiences I’ve had were around other devotees or in the presence of a saint or Master. …. Jitendra
This is how you develop the consciousness of His Presence every day, because you’re thinking about Him in everything that you do—until your whole day becomes one long prayer, one long meditation for Him. It is living. It is not that you have to sit alone in meditation, although that must be—early in the morning and late at night you must meditate—but you must also practice meditation all through the day. You can do it when you’re walking, when you’re eating, when you’re working, and you even get so you do it when you’re sleeping, because is that not the withdrawal of the mind into the deeper consciousness?
Paramahansa Yogananda