This is my favorite! For the choosing to come back question, the combination of beliefs that come mostly from what I’ve learned and partially from what my guides have said are this: Our higher selves are learning. Always. Our guides are also still learning, they’re just more advanced than our higher selves and this is the job they chose. (Or job that chose them?) Our higher selves have vast information from our lives and their studies in the spirit world. BUT, do you ever have it — especially as we get older — where you know something but you suddenly realize, “ohhh now I get it…”? There’s the thing you knew theoretically but suddenly you now get it experientially. There’s also the latent knowledge, where you have an epiphany (for me it’s often about my childhood/relationship traumas informing things I do now) and it’s like, “I of course knew this somewhere but for some reason I never articulated or synthesized it until now.” And there’s the song (or other creative work) you always loved, maybe since childhood, and you listen to it while you’re going through something and it’s like, “Woah this song suddenly makes sense, I KNOW what it’s about now!” This is why we’re here to learn. The higher self is kind of the brain (funny to say since we’re always talking about us as the brain and our HS as the soul), and we’re like its nerves on the ground, sucking up the experiences, stimuli, and reactions and reporting back, and they process it with us. Us doing that is a big aspect of how they grow. I believe our guides are our teachers in spirit world, but also are growing through teaching and helping us on Earth. And Earth is supposedly a very hard school, like we’re getting our doctorates. So the more we learn, the more everyone learns, and they are learning together, so what we pick up here spreads. Also, I kind of think we create worlds, and that we feel a responsibility to advance those creations through our interactions. And maybe when we feel like we’ve learned what makes a world worth living in, we try new creations.