Have you ever heard of souls splintering? Is it possible for someone to have so much karma that their soul splinters? Does this lead them to have more than one body in future incarnations?
– Laura
Dear Laura:
Let’s begin with the idea that parts of us can splinter off, and then try to relate that to the process of incarnation.
Many spiritual and psychological models support the notion that people commonly disassociate from certain parts of themselves in response to trauma. It’s like going into a state of shock during an emergency: it helps us to cope with an intolerable level of physical, emotional, or mental pain.
Problems arise when we remain partially numbed or shut down following such experiences. Then these traumas or issues go “unconscious,” and until we deal with them, they remain energetically frozen. This can lead to mental and emotional problems like depression, numbness, emptiness, phobias, addictions, compulsions, unconscious habits and even physical illness.
Most of us sense that there is more to “life” and more to “us” than we normally experience. As we have a natural compulsion to make ourselves “whole” again, we are constantly seeking to fill this inner void. For most of us this quest takes place on a less than conscious level, and as a result, we try all sorts of things that don’t work, or only seem to work temporarily.
In the shamanic tradition, these frozen parts of ourselves are believed to be stuck in a dimension beyond the physical, and by journeying into that dimension, the shaman can find those lost parts and return them to us. This process is called “soul retrieval.”
While the traumatic experiences that lead to disassociation may occur in this life, they can also occur in “past lives.” I put “past lives” in quotes here, because in order to understand how our souls can “splinter,” we need to remember that time isn’t linear, so past lives are perhaps better labeled “other lives” or “parallel lives.”
Imagine that the life we think we are living is just the movie we are choosing to watch right now. There are many different stations playing many different shows, but we are only aware of the one we are watching at the moment. When we step back and begin to observe ourselves, we become aware that there are lots of other stations running other story lines, and by switching the channel on our awareness, we can view them.
It’s pretty hard to wrap our heads around these notions because our brains are programmed to think in this physical dimension of space and time. When we shift our consciousness outside of the body into higher states of mind, we can transcend the limits of space/time thinking and tap into information about the so-called past and future, like information about other lives.
Obviously, time DOES exist within each physical dimension. As parallel dimensions are not in linear relationship to each other, however, you can shift from any point in one physical dimension to any point in another.
Since these other lives are not really past or future, we are living other lives while living this one. You could say that our soul has “splintered” into more than one life, but that would be true of everyone. Who we think we are now is just a fragment of our totality. We are always exploring many different lives/levels of experience. The more we evolve spiritually, the more we tend to gain awareness of these other parts of ourselves.
For example, as we grow spiritually, it’s common to begin to remember our dream life, and our dreams are real explorations in other dimensions. We may also gain awareness of “past lives” and have conscious out of body experiences. The more we grow in awareness, the more refined our journey toward personal growth becomes, for we can then begin to purposefully “retrieve” and heal parts of ourselves we may have disassociated from.
Often trigger events awaken old memories, energies and issues that need healing. These may be sparked when we reach a certain age, meet someone we have known in another life, or experience some trauma that touches a “sore spot” that has been wounded before.
As for why we aren’t normally aware of these other lives, it’s important for us to think that this life is our only life, and that everything that happens here is “real” and very serious. It’s sort of like life is a fire drill: if we knew it was just a drill, we wouldn’t respond the same way – in fact, we may begin to fail to respond at all.
When we become “enlightened,” apparently that is just what happens – we realize that it’s all a drill or a movie, so there is nothing to get all worked up about. At this point, we generally evolve beyond the cycle of rebirth in the physical, because it’s no fun anymore.
For some reason, the idea of parallel lives seems harder to accept than the idea of past lives, though if you think about it, it’s no weirder than believing in the life we’re living right now. Because it seems so far out, however, I rarely talk about the experiences I’ve personally had that support the notion that I may be living other lives simultaneously.
For example, I have at times believed that I was channeling spirits, only to find out that I was channeling some aspect of a living person. The first time this happened, I was reading for a man who lived in Germany, and I brought through “a spirit” named Klaus. I described him in detail, including his clothes, mannerisms, and smoking habit. My client wrote back to inform me that he didn’t know anyone in Spirit like this, but I had described his coworker Klaus to a “T.” We concluded that Klaus was unaware of this whole interaction, which led me to realize that it is possible for aspects of our being to do all sorts of stuff without us ever knowing it.
Also, many years ago I had an amazing dream in which I WAS a dolphin. There are no words to convey the way this whole experience felt. I had a dolphin body and a dolphin “family” and community. Having a dolphin body was fantastic, and having a dolphin “mind” was totally foreign to anything I’d ever experienced before. I was completely in the moment and totally carefree. This dream made me wonder if I had been a dolphin in a past life or something.
Following this experience, I had some amazing dolphin encounters. Then some years later, I gave birth to a daughter who has grown up obsessed with dolphins. She wants to be a marine biologist someday, and her room is ocean blue and filled with dolphin things. Mind you, I never told her about my own connection to dolphins because my dolphin experiences happened long before she was even born, so it was really striking when she developed this obsession with dolphins on her own. She even has the ability to telepathically communicate with dolphins. (Alas, my space is limited here, or I would share more about these amazing dolphin experiences.)
When I encountered the idea of parallel lives, suddenly it hit me: maybe instead of having a past life as a dolphin, I am living a parallel life as a dolphin – and perhaps my daughter is too! As I see it, it’s really no stranger than believing we may have had past lives as dolphins.
Of course, there are no hard and fast answers when it comes to matters this deep – there are only theories, intuitions and best guesses. No one can tell you for sure exactly how we incarnate, if it’s possible for our souls to splinter, or even if we do lead parallel lives. I am certain, however, that the Universe is far stranger than we could ever comprehend, and there is much more happening “behind the scenes” than we ever realize.