Tag Archive: reincarnation


How Do We Plan Future Incarnations?

Filed Under: Destiny/Higher Plan, Past Lives, Reincarnation, Relationships by Soul Arcanum — Comments Off on How Do We Plan Future Incarnations?

Copyright Soul Arcanum LLC. All rights reserved. All rights reserved. :)
 

Dear Soul Arcanum:

I’ve always wondered something about reincarnation. How do we choose our next lives? What makes us choose to have some experiences and not others, for example? Do we choose our occupations? How we’ll look? How much planning do we get to do?
– Rachel

Dear Rachel:

Please note that this is only my understanding of reincarnation based upon what I’ve read. You may want to explore the works of Michael Newton, Ph.D.; he has hypnotically regressed many people to the period between lives and extensively explored these very issues.

It is mind boggling to ponder all of the factors that may come into play with planning a future life. Where does one begin? By way of metaphor, we might compare this to adopting a child. First I imagine you have to consider your options. What children (bodies) are available to you? Do you want a boy or a girl? Do you want a child (body) from a particular place or culture? The more particular you are in your needs, the harder it must be to find just the right fit.

Just as some prospective parents will be very careful to make sure that everything is just right before they adopt, others will be a bit more reckless and impatient. We each have our own unique nature, and it’s my understanding that we go about planning future lives much as we go about living this one.

Alternatively, we might compare incarnating in the physical like planning a trip or adventure. We will have certain things we feel drawn to exploring. For some of us, it may be most important that we have the opportunity to further develop and exercise certain skills, or to make a difference in the world. In this case, we may need to make sure we’re born to a family that will give us the opportunities to do this, or that we have a physical body capable of supporting our goals. Usually such a person will know from a fairly young age what their “higher purpose” is; they will feel drawn to this again and again, or display a gift related to it.

For others, these sorts of considerations may not be so important; they may not care so much what they do or where they do it so long as they can be with a certain special someone, or affect karmic healing of a particular personal issue. For these people, the body and life they choose will be largely determined by their ability to meet and create relationships with key individuals, or engage in certain experiences.

On top of all the personal desires and needs we must consider, we also all have “soul families” that we tend to incarnate with again and again. We meet up with them in the “afterlife,” where we plan future adventures with them. We can usually find members of our soul family in the people we are closest to of our own generation. The folks in generations before and after ours may be special to us, but probably are not of our own soul group. Grandparents we have shared a special sense of kinship to, however, are often individuals from our own soul family.

Thus our siblings, best friends, lovers and mates – these people are probably from our soul family, while our parents, children, aunts, uncles, etc., are probably not from our own soul family. While they may be very special to us, they are not necessarily of the same vibration or working on the same lessons and issues we are, and are thus probably not our first priorities when we are planning future lives and relationships.

Further, usually we will choose to have very different experiences from one lifetime to the next. We may be intrigued by the idea of incarnating in a different culture, for example, and living a very different life from the one we’ve just left behind. Again, imagine that you’re planning your next vacation: most people would choose to explore somewhere new, though a few might want to return to the same place they always go because it’s dear to them. If, however, someone very important to us has decided to incarnate into a certain family in China, we may very well say, “Hey, that sounds fine. I’ll do the same so I can be near you.”

Once we choose where we want to be and what will be most important to us in this next life, we may begin to explore our options for bodies. Sometimes we will accept bodies that may not be ideal in order to get other things that are more important. Sometimes we may accept bodies that have special challenges in order to develop other capacities. For example, if we strongly desire to explore physical power and energy, we may choose a very powerful, athletic body. If, however, we need to develop more on the inside – build up our intellects or our spiritual awareness – we may see a physically challenged body as an ideal catalyst for this sort of development. If we are strongly determined to be in a certain place or with a certain person, we may be more flexible about the particular body we get, so long as our main goals are assured.

I don’t want to imply that we are choosing all of this in a very conscious way, like sitting down with a brochure and a checklist. For most people, I imagine that planning a future life is sort of a dreamy process, and more one of emotional desire leading us naturally to fulfillment than mental planning. As we evolve in our spiritual development, however, we gain more conscious control over our lives – both this life and our future lives.

There is only so much control we have over the physical. If we choose a certain set of parents, for example, then we have to work with the DNA they have to offer. By way of gross example, we can’t decide to be born Asian to Caucasian parents. We have to work with the physical foundation available much as we work with the physical body we’ve been given after we’ve incarnated.

This is why spiritual development is so powerful and valuable; the more evolved we are, the more the soul is leading versus the body/ego. So a very advanced soul may have a lot of conscious control over a future life, as well as the ability to mold the physical body to the vibration of its soul energy. In a less evolved soul, the body/ego does more of the leading, and one feels more “at the mercy” of one’s instinctive reactions and physical reality. This only makes sense if you think about it. For example, if one gains the ability to consciously manifest healing in the body by working with natural spiritual law, then one has far more influence over the body than someone who has yet to evolve into this level of wisdom and understanding.

I do believe that whatever we focus upon, we manifest, and that this would be true of manifesting a new life. When we focus upon something with strong emotion, we naturally flow toward it. This is a natural process that leads us into new experiences, including new lives. So if there is something we greatly fear, we will probably manifest it. It’s interesting to ponder how when we experience something, we usually learn from it and eventually lose our fear of it. If there is something we greatly desire, we will probably manifest that too, and by fulfilling that desire, eventually come to a point where we don’t crave it anymore.

Perhaps the one exception to this rule is that of true love: It is the one force that never dwindles away, but instead can inspire us forever. This is the force that keeps us longing for and reuniting with our loved ones or “soul mates” lifetime after lifetime. Perhaps it is the unending nature of this force that leads us to consider true love to be so divine.

In summary, if you want to have more conscious control over your future lives, devote yourself to spiritual growth in this one. If you work through your personal issues, cultivate love and harmony in relationships, and stretch yourself into new potential, your efforts will be rewarded forevermore.

– Soul Arcanum

 

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Can Souls Splinter?

Filed Under: Healing, Karma, Reincarnation, Strange Phenomena by Soul Arcanum — Comments Off on Can Souls Splinter?

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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.

 

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What’s the Benefit of Past Life Knowledge?

Filed Under: Healing, Past Lives, Reincarnation by Soul Arcanum — Comments Off on What’s the Benefit of Past Life Knowledge?

Copyright Soul Arcanum LLC. All rights reserved. All rights reserved. :)
 

Dear Soul Arcanum:

I have not talked to one person who said that they remembered a previous life and benefited from that knowledge. I have known two supposed Cleopatras, and I am sure there are a million more of them, but the one’s I have known were not a full bowl of soup, if you know what I mean. I’m writing to ask what the point of exploring past lives might be. How can this supposed knowledge and awareness help us in these fast changing times we live in?
Michael

Dear Michael:

We have all heard stories about past life seminars boasting not just one but several Cleopatras, Mark Anthonys, Abraham Lincolns, etc. While I applaud your discernment, I would no more allow these individuals to taint my entire outlook on reincarnation than I would allow a few rapists to taint my view of all mankind.

I feel there are really two issues here. First, as you seem to be questioning the validity of remembering past lives at all, if not questioning the very fact of reincarnation, I encourage you to explore some of the astounding evidence researchers have uncovered for yourself. You might begin with well-respected author Dr. Ian Stevenson, who wrote Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation and more recently, Where Reincarnation and Biology Intersect. Beyond this, allow your intuition and interest to guide your research. A search for books on reincarnation at amazon.com yielded me nearly 8,000 hits.

I think simply believing in reincarnation itself is healing. Knowing that we can’t run truly avoid life’s lessons (for they will be presented to us over and over again until we master them) generally motivates us to face our issues promptly and honestly. Similarly, knowing that suicide is not an escape would certainly motivate us to find some way to endure and to heal. In the words of theosophist Annie Besant:

All life changes its aspect when reincarnation becomes a settled conviction, beyond all argument, raised above all dispute. Each day of life but one page in the great drama of existence; each sorrow but a fleeting shadow cast by a passing cloud; each joy but a gleam of sunshine reflected from a swinging mirror; each death but the moving from a worn-out house. The strength of an eternal youth begins slowly to pass into the awakening life; the calmness of a vast serenity broods over the tossing waves of human thought. The radiant glory of the immortal Intelligence pierces the thick dusky clouds of matter, and the imperishable Peace that nought can ruffle sheds its pure whiteness over the triumphant spirit.

Believing in reincarnation not only shifts one’s entire perspective on life; it opens one up to the transformational power of past life therapy, which can be helpful in the same ways that “normal” therapy is. When we bring our unconscious fears and motivations to the surface, we can consciously work on changing them in order to create greater health and happiness. When conventional medical or psychological therapy fails time and time again, past life therapy has often shown amazing effectiveness. Some people spend many years trying to resolve lifelong chronic problems such as phobias, addictions, anxiety disorders, eating disorders, chronic unexplainable pain or illness, self-destructive habits, unhealthy relationships, etc. and never see results. While researchers may not be able to explain exactly why or how, past life therapy often leads to rapid improvement in these patients’ lives. To me, this suggests that the cause must have been in a past life as well.

For example, I have heard of people who experienced chronic headaches, who had sought all kinds of medical help to no avail, and upon “recalling” a traumatic death due to a head injury in a past life, were cured. Now you can call this the placebo effect or brainwashing or whatever you want – I’m sure the person who is no longer suffering doesn’t really care, so long as it works. There are many other problems that frequently stem from past lives, from physical ailments like chronic fatigue and fibromyalgia to eating disorders and addictions. Many people who are overweight this lifetime have starved to death in a past life, and are unconsciously eating all they can to avoid that fate again. When they recognize what is subconsciously driving their behavior, they’re empowered to change. Many phobias stem from past life experiences. A fear of fire may signal a prior death by fire, or a fear of snakes may stem from a deadly snake bite. By consciously recognizing that our fear is out of place in the present, we begin to put things in a sane perspective and reclaim our personal power to create what we want in our lives.

In my own reading work, I have seen many relationships transformed via past life awareness. For example, I recently read for a woman whose husband was her father in a past life. All I knew going into the reading was that the relationship was troubled because her husband was very possessive and controlling, and she was tired of it. I relayed information about a past life in which she was his son, and he was her father. As his son, she worked in the family business (making things like saddles, bags, belts, etc. out of leather) and as she grew into a young man, she wanted to go to a big city nearby, but her father wanted her to stay and work with him. He became very controlling at that point in an attempt to hold on to her. In response to the reading, she wrote that she was amazed by this information, for she is working in the family business again THIS lifetime, and wants to leave it to do something more fulfilling, but she feels pressure from both her father and her husband (who is also in the business) to remain.

Learning of this past life connection helped her to realize why she seems to naturally succumb to her husband’s wishes. Her friends have often told her she should just tell him no, but she has found that very difficult to do, for it is more “natural” to her to obey him as a child obeys her father. She then realized that she could spend another whole lifetime doing what others wish of her, or she could learn the lesson and find the courage to stand up for herself and make her own decisions. In simply understanding her unconscious feelings and responses, she was freed to consciously choose something else.

It often happens as well that two people will meet and “fall in love,” and yet have a hard time fully entering the relationship. Sometimes this stems from past life betrayals, which lead to an unwarranted sense of mistrust in this life. More often, such guardedness is born of fear of loss. When someone we love deeply dies unexpectedly in a past life, it can be very hard to let ourselves love them all out again in a future life. We may live on edge, both wanting to enter in fully and afraid that at any moment, they could be taken from us. When we uncover the past life memories that may be generating this fear of loss, we can stop unconsciously holding back.

Past life memories help us put death in perspective: when we realize that in a past life we “lost someone” and now that person is right back in our experience, it helps us to make peace with the inevitable separation of death, for we know that we’ll be with them again in the future, so it’s “safe” to go ahead and love with all our hearts and souls.

A wonderful internet resource for information on past life healing can be found at healpastlives.com. There you’ll find lots of information, exercises you can do yourself and more. As your question reveals that your inner being is guiding you to explore reincarnation and past life therapy, I encourage you to explore the subject with an open mind and heart!

– Soul Arcanum

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Historical Portrait Sparks Strange Feelings

Filed Under: Past Lives, Reincarnation, Relationships, Strange Phenomena by Soul Arcanum — Comments Off on Historical Portrait Sparks Strange Feelings


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Dear Soul Arcanum:

I hope you can help me understand this strange occurance. While visiting a city in northern Europe a few months ago, I felt instantly drawn to a man I saw on a painting. I did some research, and it appears that this man was a statesman who died in the mid 17th century. While I was visiting the city, I felt this strange sense of familiarity. I am not saying that I was experiencing deja vu or recognizing specific places, but now and then, for a few seconds everything felt familiar to me. It was as if I had been there before but all in a very blurred sort of way. Since then, I have been looking for information about that man, getting to know more about him, and even drawing his portrait. I feel stupid to feel this attraction because this is so unreal! He looks exactly like the kind of men I was attracted to as a younger girl. I really don’t know what to think of all this. Is it just my imagination? Is it just because I am very sensitive to the arts and historical places, or is my unconscious trying to tell me something?

S.

Dear S.:

While this is almost certainly past life related, before I go into that, I do want to mention one other possibility. Thinking of a particular person in spirit tends to draw that spirit close, so it’s possible for spirits to become attached to any item that makes people here think about them. I can think of no item better suited for this than a portrait. If the spirit of this man is attached to his portrait, then when people gaze at it and wonder about him, he may try to influence them. This would be especially true if someone who is particularly psychically sensitive were involved. If this spirit was stuck between planes, the spirit could then attach to such an individual and try hard to communicate with them. I don’t feel this is what is happening here, but I wanted to mention it so that people know it’s a possibility.

To me, it is clear that you knew this man in a past life, and that you had a loving, positive relationship with him. I actually hear such stories all the time. When someone is famous in some way, it makes it easy for anyone who knew them in a past life to find and recognize them on a soul level.

I often hear from individuals who are certain that they have a soul connection to some figure in the media. Like you, they tend to feel kind of crazy about this, but I think it makes perfect sense. It’s not like they feel this way about all sorts of different celebrities – there is just one figure to whom they feel strangely connected. Imagine that you knew and loved someone in a past life, and then you saw their picture on a billboard or saw them on the evening news. Most likely, you would have the classic symptoms of a past life encounter: time would seem to stop for a moment, your attention would be completely grabbed by that person, and you would have this strange feeling that you either know them, will know them, or simply have some profound connection to them.

On a logical level these connections may seem unlikely, but they happen more than common logic would explain because we are naturally drawn toward people we’ve known in past lives. It’s a bit like gravity; what goes up must come down, and what is pulled apart must come back together. So, for example, if you have a strong past life connection to the mayor of some town in Idaho, then the one time that mayor makes national news, synchronicity would make sure you saw it.

This brings us to your experience. I encourage you to review how you came to visit that particular city in northern Europe and how you came to view that portrait in particular. People often have inexplicable feelings of affinity, curiosity, and familiarity with places and cultures from past lives, so someone who has always longed to go to Japan or Ireland probably does so for past life reasons.

As for how you came to view that particular portrait, I’m betting that you either felt strongly drawn toward that experience or that synchronicity played a role. For example, you may have seen a brochure about a tour that included that portrait and felt a very strong desire to take that tour. Sometimes the way we make such connections is more unconscious; it’s like we find ourselves sort of sleep walking along like puppets being guided by some outside force. It’s a difficult thing to describe, but if you’ve had such an experience, you know what I’m talking about.

Often these connections come about through interesting and unlikely twists in the course of our experience. For example, we may have a conscious plan to do one thing, but then our alarm clock malfunctions, we miss the bus, it suddenly starts to pour, and so we duck into the nearest doorway. There, we run into someone we’re meant to meet or we discover something like your portrait – a strong tie to a past life or our future destiny.

How this happens for the individual largely depends on how consciously psychic they are. If you’re the sort of person who listens within and acts on your intuitions, then you will naturally flow toward the answers to your questions, destined connections, and the fulfillment of your desires. If you tend to be more physically focused and rational, these strange experiences tend to be rarer and to come about in stranger ways, for the Universe has to work much harder when we’re not working with it; when we are constantly asking for direction and acting on the inner prompts we receive, we make it easy for the Universe to guide us.

I love that you mentioned that this man in the portrait looks just like the sort of men you were attracted to when you were younger, for I believe that both past and future loves play a strong role in the “types” we are attracted to. One of my earliest experiences of “destiny” began when I was around 12 years old and saw Mikhail Baryshnikov on the cover of People magazine. Like you with your portrait, time seemed to stop and I was gripped by his image. I remember thinking that he was the most beautiful man I’d ever seen. Fast forward seven years to when I met my future husband for the first time. My first thought was: He looks exactly like Baryshnikov! I am convinced that, instead of being drawn to my husband because he looked like a famous dancer, I was drawn to the image on the magazine cover because he looked like my future husband!

It’s possible that you’re about to meet this man from the past again – in his new form of course. As these destined junctures approach, all sorts of interesting things tend to happen. It’s possible that your soul knows that you’re about to reconnect, and in searching for him, it led you back to the last place you saw this man. (How romantic!) The good news is that if you keep following your impulses and instincts like this, if you’re destined to reconnect, you will naturally be drawn together again.

To get more information about your potential history with this man, you might pursue past life regression therapy. Through a psychic reading, you could find out if you’re going to meet him again and what your subconscious may be trying to tell you through these unusual feelings.

– Soul Arcanum

 

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Idiosyncracies and Past Lives

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Dear Soul Arcanum:

I’ve been watching a show called Taboo on the National Geographic Channel, which is about people who are strange in ways that society finds unacceptable. While there are experts on the show who explain the sociological and psychological issues involved, every time I watch it, I think there must be some past life stuff going on. Are you familiar with this show? If so, do you agree with me?

Tammy

Dear Tammy:

While I wasn’t familiar with this show, it was easy enough to look it up and record an episode. When watching it, I had the exact same reaction you did. In fact, every case on the program could easily be explained by past life issues. I’ll go through three of the cases featured on the episode I watched to explain how past lives could be involved.

The most shocking case involved a woman who is for the most part able-bodied who has a desire to become a paraplegic. This desire is so strong that her biggest dream in life is to have surgery to sever her spinal cord. When she is around other people, she confines herself to a wheelchair, so all of her coworkers apparently assume that she is actually a paraplegic. When she is by herself, however, one of her favorite activities is hiking in the woods.

How can we possibly explain someone who can walk wishing that they could lose that ability? Given all the disabled people in the world who wish with all of their hearts that they were able-bodied, I was shocked to discover that there are many able-bodied people who wish they were paralyzed, had limbs amputated, were blind or otherwise suffered from some disability. Most explain that this is not so much a desire as an intrinsic part of who they are and how they feel about themselves. In other words, it’s not that they wish they were disabled – they already feel disabled. They are conflicted because part of them knows they are able-bodied, yet part of them feels this is wrong – that they really are disabled or “should” be, for that is what feels right and natural to them.

This has been labeled Body Integrity Identity Disorder, or BIID, by scientists who are exploring biological problems in the brain to explain it. To me, however, it makes far more sense to at least begin by looking to past lives for an explanation. For example, as I watched the section of the show about the woman who wants to be a paraplegic, I kept seeing her in a past life in India. She was a little girl who had suffered a birth defect and had to pull herself along by her arms.

I can only imagine how it would be to be unable to walk, how much time such an individual may spend thinking about their disability, and the deep mark this would make on one’s self-image. It is possible for our past life self-image to leak through into future lives just like other issues do. This would certainly explain someone who can walk who feels like this is somehow wrong or untrue.

Some people suffering from BIID state that they would do anything to be free of it. I strongly urge anyone who feels this way to find a competent hypnotherapist and give regression therapy a try, for if the cause of such torment really is a past life, the problem could easily be healed and released.

It is important to avoid assuming that whatever is going on must go back to a past life, however, for it could just as easily be rooted in earlier experiences in this lifetime. It is also possible for both to be involved. For example, the woman who wants to be a paraplegic did explain that when she was a child, she was fascinated by her aunt’s wheelchair, and remembers wishing she could have one herself. It is possible that there was something about her aunt’s situation that appealed to her, and that this gave birth to her strange desire to be a paraplegic herself. She may have deeply loved or admired this aunt or been envious of the aunt because she was receiving an abundance of love and attention due to her condition.

To complicate matters further, it often happens that the first conscious memory we have of an issue is actually a memory of a trigger. In this case, if the woman had been disabled in a past life, then being around her aunt could have brought the energies and memories of that past life experience back to life for her. If she did indeed have to drag herself along the ground in a past life, her desire for a wheel chair of her own would make sense. Once past life energy is triggered in some way, it comes back to life instead of remaining dormant, which can cause all sorts of problems until it is healed and released.

The episode I watched also featured a millionaire who has a secret life as a hobo. Though he has a successful business and a beautiful home and family, twice a year, he hits the road with no money in his pockets and wanders the countryside, stealing rides on trains just like hobos did in America’s past.

To me, this case had past lives written all over it. Though he explained that he fell in love with the freedom of the hobo lifestyle many years ago when his first wife broke his heart and he struck out to leave his former life behind, we must keep in mind that many people suffer broken hearts but almost none of them abandon their lives and society by becoming hobos.

As I was watching this man, I could see him in a past life as a hobo around the 1930s. While most of us may think this would be a terrible way to live, it was clear that there were some unparalleled highs he regularly experienced in that lifetime, and that he tasted a level of freedom that few of us ever know. It was clear to me that in his past life as a hobo, he both relished his freedom and developed a strong desire to be rich and successful. He has found a way to fulfill both of those desires in this lifetime.

The last taboo featured on the episode I watched involved “Furries” – people who like to dress up and act like animals. This naturally made me wonder if these individuals were animals in past lives. While this is a matter of some controversy, there are some spiritual traditions that believe we can reincarnate as plants or animals, or that we all evolve through a series of life forms, from mineral to plant to animal to human.

Personally, I do believe that we can incarnate in non-human form, for I have had vivid, visceral memories and dreams of being a dolphin. If someone had been an animal in past lives and this was their first human life, it would make sense that they may feel more comfortable in animal than human form.

I think it would be powerful to study the effects of regression therapy on individuals who have extremely unusual desires and habits, for it could lead to much greater understanding of various “disorders” and true healing for many who have been unable to find relief via conventional therapies. In closing, please keep in mind that the above ideas are mere speculation; as every case is unique, it is important to assume nothing and allow the subconscious mind to reveal the true cause of an issue as well as what is needed in order to affect healing.

– Soul Arcanum

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Idiosyncrasies and Past Lives

Filed Under: Past Lives, Reincarnation by Soul Arcanum — Comments Off on Idiosyncrasies and Past Lives


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Dear Soul Arcanum:

I’ve been watching a show called Taboo on the National Geographic Channel, which is about people who are strange in ways that society finds unacceptable. While there are experts on the show who explain the sociological and psychological issues involved, every time I watch it, I think there must be some past life stuff going on. Are you familiar with this show? If so, do you agree with me?

Tammy

Dear Tammy:

While I wasn’t familiar with this show, it was easy enough to look it up and record an episode. When watching it, I had the exact same reaction you did. In fact, every case on the program could easily be explained by past life issues. I’ll go through three of the cases featured on the episode I watched to explain how past lives could be involved.

The most shocking case involved a woman who is for the most part able-bodied who has a desire to become a paraplegic. This desire is so strong that her biggest dream in life is to have surgery to sever her spinal cord. When she is around other people, she confines herself to a wheelchair, so all of her coworkers apparently assume that she is actually a paraplegic. When she is by herself, however, one of her favorite activities is hiking in the woods.

How can we possibly explain someone who can walk wishing that they could lose that ability? Given all the disabled people in the world who wish with all of their hearts that they were able-bodied, I was shocked to discover that there are many able-bodied people who wish they were paralyzed, had limbs amputated, were blind or otherwise suffered from some disability. Most explain that this is not so much a desire as an intrinsic part of who they are and how they feel about themselves. In other words, it’s not that they wish they were disabled – they already feel disabled. They are conflicted because part of them knows they are able-bodied, yet part of them feels this is wrong – that they really are disabled or “should” be, for that is what feels right and natural to them.

This has been labeled Body Integrity Identity Disorder, or BIID, by scientists who are exploring biological problems in the brain to explain it. To me, however, it makes far more sense to at least begin by looking to past lives for an explanation. For example, as I watched the section of the show about the woman who wants to be a paraplegic, I kept seeing her in a past life in India. She was a little girl who had suffered a birth defect and had to pull herself along by her arms.

I can only imagine how it would be to be unable to walk, how much time such an individual may spend thinking about their disability, and the deep mark this would make on one’s self-image. It is possible for our past life self-image to leak through into future lives just like other issues do. This would certainly explain someone who can walk who feels like this is somehow wrong or untrue.

Some people suffering from BIID state that they would do anything to be free of it. I strongly urge anyone who feels this way to find a competent hypnotherapist and give regression therapy a try, for if the cause of such torment really is a past life, the problem could easily be healed and released.

It is important to avoid assuming that whatever is going on must go back to a past life, however, for it could just as easily be rooted in earlier experiences in this lifetime. It is also possible for both to be involved. For example, the woman who wants to be a paraplegic did explain that when she was a child, she was fascinated by her aunt’s wheelchair, and remembers wishing she could have one herself. It is possible that there was something about her aunt’s situation that appealed to her, and that this gave birth to her strange desire to be a paraplegic herself. She may have deeply loved or admired this aunt or been envious of the aunt because she was receiving an abundance of love and attention due to her condition.

To complicate matters further, it often happens that the first conscious memory we have of an issue is actually a memory of a trigger. In this case, if the woman had been disabled in a past life, then being around her aunt could have brought the energies and memories of that past life experience back to life for her. If she did indeed have to drag herself along the ground in a past life, her desire for a wheel chair of her own would make sense. Once past life energy is triggered in some way, it comes back to life instead of remaining dormant, which can cause all sorts of problems until it is healed and released.

The episode I watched also featured a millionaire who has a secret life as a hobo. Though he has a successful business and a beautiful home and family, twice a year, he hits the road with no money in his pockets and wanders the countryside, stealing rides on trains just like hobos did in America’s past.

To me, this case had past lives written all over it. Though he explained that he fell in love with the freedom of the hobo lifestyle many years ago when his first wife broke his heart and he struck out to leave his former life behind, we must keep in mind that many people suffer broken hearts but almost none of them abandon their lives and society by becoming hobos.

As I was watching this man, I could see him in a past life as a hobo around the 1930s. While most of us may think this would be a terrible way to live, it was clear that there were some unparalleled highs he regularly experienced in that lifetime, and that he tasted a level of freedom that few of us ever know. It was clear to me that in his past life as a hobo, he both relished his freedom and developed a strong desire to be rich and successful. He has found a way to fulfill both of those desires in this lifetime.

The last taboo featured on the episode I watched involved “Furries” – people who like to dress up and act like animals. This naturally made me wonder if these individuals were animals in past lives. While this is a matter of some controversy, there are some spiritual traditions that believe we can reincarnate as plants or animals, or that we all evolve through a series of life forms, from mineral to plant to animal to human.

Personally, I do believe that we can incarnate in non-human form, for I have had vivid, visceral memories and dreams of being a dolphin. If someone had been an animal in past lives and this was their first human life, it would make sense that they may feel more comfortable in animal than human form.

I think it would be powerful to study the effects of regression therapy on individuals who have extremely unusual desires and habits, for it could lead to much greater understanding of various “disorders” and true healing for many who have been unable to find relief via conventional therapies. In closing, please keep in mind that the above ideas are mere speculation; as every case is unique, it is important to assume nothing and allow the subconscious mind to reveal the true cause of an issue as well as what is needed in order to affect healing.

– Soul Arcanum


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She’s Afraid of Her Past Lives

Filed Under: Past Lives, Reincarnation by Soul Arcanum — Comments Off on She’s Afraid of Her Past Lives


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Dear Soul Arcanum:

Over the past week, I have for some reason begun to remember and re-experience some of my past lives. This was triggered by the sudden recognition of my current boyfriend as my lover in my most recent past life. (We were a lesbian couple and I died suddenly in a car accident and never got to say goodbye.) I also remember us in another past life as a happily married couple in ancient Israel. I remember the sad existence I lived as a captive cheetah in Victorian England, along with the sorrow I felt as my coat thinned and the humiliation I felt when humans jeered at me. As these memories came back to me, I sobbed and shook and cradled my right hand as I remembered my paw getting slammed in my cage door. In that life, my boyfriend was a boy who cleaned my cage and was kind to me. I remember being a Jewish woman in the Holocaust, and my boyfriend was a young Nazi soldier in the concentration camp who used to bring me gifts of canned food. The past life that I am currently processing seems to have taken place in Puritan New England. I am starting to have memories of flames licking my feet; I think I was burned at the stake. Can you help me? I am really afraid to meditate or do anything that causes my mind to loosen because of how painful it has been to remember my past lives. This particular life I am describing seems to be related to many of the problems and irrational fears both my boyfriend and I have in this life. It seems like we have been linked in many different lives. Thank you very much.

Heather

Dear Heather:

There are a number of reasons we may begin to spontaneously remember past life experiences. When we begin to awaken psychically, it’s like we open a window between our conscious minds and our eternal selves. This allows us access to the wisdom of our souls, which can flood us with all sorts of insights. For example, we may suddenly feel called to take our lives in a new direction, begin to recognize people we’ve known in other lifetimes, and receive amazing intuitions on a regular basis.

As you describe, sometimes our past life memories begin to flood to the surface when we reconnect with someone we have a very strong karmic connection to. My first past life memory came up when my son was a baby and I was rocking him to sleep. Suddenly I realized that night after night, I kept seeing the same mental image of a meadow. Also, church hymns I never learned in this lifetime were running through my mind, and I began to wonder how in the world I knew the words and melodies. I believe this memory came up suddenly for the reasons I mentioned above: this was a time of great psychic awakening for me, and my son had just returned to my experience as my baby. I also believe that rocking him to sleep put me into a trance, which allowed me greater access to this sort of information.

Many people have spontaneous psychic flashes upon meeting someone who feels familiar; these may be past life memories or symbolic messages from their subconscious minds. It’s also common to have visions of the future when meeting someone for the first time; these visions let us know that that person is going to be around in our lives for a while or will somehow prove important. Often people dismiss these images as random and meaningless because they don’t seem to have anything to do with what is happening in the moment.

While there are other reasons we may spontaneously begin to remember our past lives, the important thing for you to realize is that your conscious awareness of all of these memories is a great gift and blessing, for the more conscious we are of the deeper nature of our relationship to someone, the more power we have to work on resolving old issues in order to create something better this time around.

Your anxiety is rooted in fear that you won’t be able to handle the pain of remembering or that remembering will somehow harm you all over again. Your reaction is a bit unusual because obviously, everything did work out in the end. Despite all you suffered in past lives, you are here today, have found your boyfriend again, and are free to create new love and happiness with him.

My sense is that your anxiety stems from all of this arising so suddenly for you. It’s important to recognize that when we are uncomfortable with a new emotional experience, instead of avoiding it, we are wise to strive to get more comfortable with it. With this in mind, I recommend you work on building a stronger spiritual foundation. It may be particularly comforting to study past life material and especially life between life research, for this material offers reassuring information about why we undertake certain lifetimes and how our souls benefit from all of our experiences. (For a starting off point, check out the books of Michael Newton, Ph.D.)

The goal is to learn to trust that these memories are coming to you for a good and beneficial reason. Also, you must trust that were you not ready for this level of psychic experience, you wouldn’t be having it. This doesn’t mean you have to undergo pain and suffering, however. There are hard ways and easy ways to do pretty much everything in life. For example, let’s say you want to lose 20 pounds. You could starve yourself and force yourself to run 10 miles a day, which would be painful and so difficult that you would probably give up. You could also take a wiser, more moderate approach: you could hire a personal trainer and consult a dietician and come up with the moderate approach that would would work best for you personally.

There are professionals who can help you gently extract the wisdom from these past life memories and then release them so you can move on to new experiences. I recommend you consult a hypnotherapist for help with all of this, for a good therapist will know when to engage the power of catharsis by taking you through intense emotions, and when to help you step outside of intense feelings so that you are aware of what happened but you don’t relive the emotions or physical pain involved. A therapist should also be able to help you pinpoint the wisdom in these experiences, after which you’ll be free to let go of them. If a memory is too intense to process all at once, it can be released slowly, much like my weight loss analogy above. It may take a little longer but it will be a much gentler, more comfortable way to go.

In addition to building a stronger spiritual foundation and seeking help from a hypnotherapist, you might work on developing a conscious relationship with your Spirit guides. This can help you in endless ways. In your current situation, when a memory upsets you, you could ask for your guides to step down the emotional charge and help you find a higher perspective on the situation.

Since these memories are coming up unbidden for you anyway, it’s pointless to try to avoid them. Instead of pushing them back down, try to relax and reach for a higher perspective on these experiences with trust that whatever comes up will prove helpful to you in some way. While the above remedies all require courage and effort, the more you dig in and work with the psychic experiences that come up for you, the more personal power, freedom, peace and healing you will enjoy.

 

 

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Why We Feel a Magnetic Pull Toward Certain Individuals

Filed Under: Past Lives, Reincarnation, Relationships by Soul Arcanum — Comments Off on Why We Feel a Magnetic Pull Toward Certain Individuals


Copyright Soul Arcanum LLC. All rights reserved. :)
 

Dear Soul Arcanum:

I am acquainted with a gentleman who evokes a strange reaction in me. Every time I see him, I feel a strong pull towards him but also a profound sense of grief. I know his energy is different from anyone else’s I have met; it’s very strong and magnetic. I don’t particularly like the way he looks, the way he dresses or even the sound of his voice. Since I don’t find him attractive, I’m baffled as to why I feel so drawn to him. After seeing him, I always end up in tears. I don’t really know what I am crying about but my soul seems to know something I don’t. I’m hoping you can explain why we feel magnetically drawn toward certain individuals and what we’re supposed to do with those feelings.

K.

Dear K.:

I know the feeling you describe well and am sure we have many readers who have had similar experiences. Though we tend to associate karmic reunions with the soul mate experience of “love at first sight,” in truth we may experience any number of different feelings upon meeting someone we’ve known in a past life.

I have experienced love at first sight a few times, and each time this happened, I wound up in a very powerful romantic relationship. I have also, however, met individuals and instantly felt inexplicable terror, unease, or simply a strange sense of familiarity. Experience has taught me to trust these feelings as meaningful. For example, the instant I first met a man who would one day end up stalking and attacking me, I felt inexplicably terrified. I am convinced that we had very intense karma between us, and that this is why he became obsessed with me. On a more positive note, when I interviewed for a job one summer in Chicago, I knew that I would both get a job offer and accept it because the woman who was to be my boss felt like someone I was going to be seeing a lot of.

It is possible to feel both drawn toward someone and unnerved by them. The relationships these connections foster usually prove to be powerful spiritual teachers. For example, when I was in college, I got involved with a <q>mean drunk</q> and went through a very painful time. When I first met this young man, I felt strongly drawn to him and at the same time profoundly uneasy around him. I believe I was intuitively sensing both the karma already between us and the challenges ahead.

The more psychically awake you are, the more you’ll tend to notice such feelings and be able to sense what they’re all about. However, even people who are psychically asleep may have such experiences when the karmic bond involved is very strong or important to their destined life plans. I believe these feelings arise from an inner spiritual compass; they help us to recognize the members of our soul family from one lifetime to the next, and they compel us to interact with the people we need to resolve karma with in order to fulfill our destined plans for each particular lifetime.

If before incarnating, two souls plan to meet and marry, they will carry this plan like a seed in their subconscious until the time comes for it to be set in motion. When they do meet, the seed comes to life and begins to grow. Their reunion awakens this memory on a more or less conscious level, which creates a sense of familiarity. The energy (karma) between them stirs up feelings that belie the nature of their existing connection. While karmic reunions tend to involve key relationships like romantic partnerships, they can involve all sorts of other bonds. Parents and children would experience strong feelings of familiarity if they were to meet for the first time as adult strangers do. In fact, adoptive parents often have strong feelings of connection when they first meet the children they are going to adopt. People who are highly psychic may recognize people they’ve known in past lives whether those people are going to be important characters in their futures or not.

It is always wise to trust our intuitive feelings and instincts. The first thing to do when these feelings arise is pay attention, for they are signs that something important is happening. When we feel frightened by someone for no apparent reason, we should take it as a sign that we should tread very carefully. When we feel drawn to someone, we should take it as a sign that we are meant to interact with them.

My feeling is that you loved this man deeply in a past life. This may have been a romantic relationship but it could just have easily been a different sort of relationship altogether. He could have been your son, your brother, your mother, your sister, your aunt, your friend or your teacher. Since you feel both strongly drawn toward him and at the same time experience profound feelings of grief whenever you see him, it is likely that when you loved him in a past life, he died before you did and you never fully healed from that loss. Just as we carry our strength and wisdom forward from past lives, we also carry old wounds that still need healing. When you see this man again, it reawakens the energy of the grief you have carried with you from the past. This grief is coming up in order to be healed and released. This will happen naturally if you simply allow those feelings to flow. Allow yourself to cry even if you don’t know why you’re crying. Allow yourself to feel what you really feel even if it seems crazy to care for someone you don’t really know well – this lifetime.

When you judge your feelings as nonsensical, you stop the flow of this energy. If instead, you surrender to your feelings with trust that they make sense on some level, you will allow those old feelings to flow through you, which will enable you to find peace in the present. You could also engage in past life therapy with a hypnotherapist to bring whatever is happening on a soul level up into your conscious awareness. This can lead to instant insights, healing and transformation.

I don’t know if it’s practical for you (my feeling is that it is not), but sometimes confessing our feelings is enough to initiate a profound shift. When we tell people we feel a strange sense of connection to them, the experience moves from an internal level to an external one, which relieves psychic tension. This makes sense because we feel strongly drawn toward someone because we are supposed to interact with them. Of course, the other person may not share our sense of connection, for they may not be as psychically awake and aware as we are. Someone who is psychically turned off may not feel anything, while someone keenly awake may both feel a sense of connection and know or intuit the reason behind it by remembering the past life experiences involved or the future destiny they are being drawn into.

It sounds like you are somewhere in the middle in that you are aware of feeling drawn toward him without knowing why. If you trust your feelings and allow them to come to the surface either of your awareness or your outer experience, you will naturally resolve any karmic tension involved and begin to fulfill your destiny as concerns this individual. Please do keep in mind that feeling strongly drawn toward someone does not mean that we are supposed to be in relationship to them forever, but rather that they are one important stop along an infinitely larger journey.

Soul Arcanum

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Healing Karma with Father who Abused Her

Filed Under: Emotional Well-being, Healing, Karma, Past Lives, Reincarnation by Soul Arcanum — Comments Off on Healing Karma with Father who Abused Her


Copyright Soul Arcanum LLC. All rights reserved. :)
 

Dear Soul Arcanum:

I “divorced” my father when I was in my late 20s because he was a pedophile who refused to acknowledge the harm he’d done to my siblings and me. I pressed criminal charges against him when I was in my early 30s and he went to jail. My brother kept in contact with him until a few years ago when he took a sexploitation trip through Thailand. I’ve been through 12-step programs for incest survivors and have done a lot of inner work. My children know why they don’t have a second grandfather. I consider myself a full survivor but want to know if there are ways to complete the emotional healing process so I don’t carry unfinished karma into my next incarnation. Thank you for the great work you do through your columns. My friends and family appreciate them too.

Moneca

Dear Moneca:

First I have to commend you for all the inner work you’ve already done to heal from the past and empower yourself for the future. I also applaud your foresight, for you are right in assuming that until this experience is fully healed, it will come up again and again for you, if not in this lifetime, then in future lives.

My sense is that you’ve pretty much made peace with this on a personal level; what’s left is to make peace with your father so you can align with a higher level of experience with him in future lives. On the other hand, you may already be at the point where you can look at the blessings that came from this experience and give thanks for the unique journey that has been yours, which is a sign that you’re at peace and ready to move on.

Before those readers who can’t see how such an experience could possibly involve any sort of blessing start sending me hate mail, let me explain. I’m sure this difficult journey made you question life and become a deeper thinker, that it stretched you to find inner strength you didn’t know you had, and that it led you to develop compassion for everyone who suffers abuse. We tend to view painful experiences as curses, but in my experience, the more life stretches our capacity to endure, the stronger and wiser we grow.

There is a key turning point in the spiritual healing process where one who has been abused begins to find compassion for the abuser. Let me share my own experience to demonstrate that I know what I’m talking about.

When I was a teenager, I was stalked and eventually raped by a crazy guy in his twenties. Though I was too young to fully realize it at the time, I have come to understand that our meeting was destined and that we already had a strong but troubled karmic bond.

His mother cut and styled hair out of her home, which is where we first encountered each other – at least, in this lifetime. When I saw him, every hair on my body stood up at attention. There was a sense of instant recognition I’ve come to associate with reuniting with someone from a past life, only this time, the feeling was far from positive. In fact, I was inexplicably terrified.

Since there was no logical reason to feel this way, I pushed the feelings aside. It’s too long a story to go into in detail here, but this guy must have felt something strong too because he began to stalk me. I would be driving home from work and see him in his car, following me. When I left school for the day, he would be in the parking lot, leaning against his car, just staring at me. He began to call me every night. When I tried to shake him off, he began to threaten to harm my little brother or my friends. I had learned that he had a number of friends who were convicted felons, so I decided to take his threats seriously.

He stalked me for months before he managed to get me alone; that’s when the rape occurred. I guess I was naïve, but I was truly shocked at how violent he became. It was following that experience that I took my power back, shed my fear of him, and took a stand by telling him that if he ever contacted me again, I would go to the police. (I know I should have gone to the police anyway, but I was sure my father would kill him if he found out, and I couldn’t bear the thought of my dad spending the rest of his life in prison.)

The turning point in my healing process came when I realized that I would rather be me and be raped by this man than to be him. As I struggled to understand why he had done what he’d done, I realized that his inner world was a really twisted, ugly place. I only had to live with his ugliness for a while; for him, it was a constant and inescapable prison.

As I had karmic encounters with other people from past lives, I also realized that I must have some history with this guy. I don’t know what happened back then, but I came to understand that we were both unconsciously acting out some old patterns. I also realized that if I didn’t want to keep circling this enemy throughout future lives, I would have to consciously change things for the better.

This is where your own story comes in. While I am in no way suggesting you try to find a way to justify what your father did or equating an attack by a stranger with the profound betrayal of a parent, it’s nevertheless true that in order to fully heal and set yourself free from this for all time, you would be wise to try to find compassion for your father.

Can you imagine what it would be like to be him? There is a lot of wisdom in saying to yourself, There but for the grace of God go I. While people like to tell themselves that they could never be as selfish or cruel as the individuals they most despise, in my view, that sort of thinking is a good way to be born as just such an individual because walking some miles in their shoes may the only way to develop compassion and understanding for them.

On my own quest for healing, it occurred to me that I may have hurt this man really badly at some point. As I pondered the karma between us, I also imagined him being raped or abused in a future lifetime in order to learn some compassion, and that’s when it occurred to me that perhaps this was why I had been attacked – to develop greater kindness and compassion than I had embodied in the past. (To better understand karmic relationships and why we reincarnate with the same people over and over again, you might want to explore the research of Michael Newton, Ph.D.)

If finding compassion for your dad proves too difficult, hypnotherapy may be just what you’re looking for. A gifted therapist can guide you in hearing your higher self so you can determine what needs to be done next in your healing process, help you heal and release any issues that are still sore spots for you, and empower you to move past any beliefs that could be preventing you from fully resolving all of this. For example, if you believe it’s not safe to forgive because you could be hurt again, working with a hypnotherapist can help you reprogram your belief system so you can bless yourself with greater peace and healing.

You will know that you have completed the healing process when you can give thanks for the wisdom, strength, compassion and other benefits you received from this experience, and when you can feel compassion for your father and sincerely hope he finds his way to the same peace you hunger for in your own heart.

Soul Arcanum

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The Reincarnation of Plants and Animals

Filed Under: Destiny/Higher Plan, Past Lives, Reincarnation by Soul Arcanum — Comments Off on The Reincarnation of Plants and Animals


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Dear Soul Arcanum:

I’ve read articles that suggest that where we end up in the afterlife is based on our thoughts and feelings. This led me to wonder if plants and animals in heaven are simply self-created thought forms or if they have independent existences. Is there a separate afterlife for plants and animals? I’m also aware of the idea that through reincarnation, plants can evolve into animals, and animals into humans, and that this is a natural process of spiritual development. Do other life forms like plants and animals immediately reincarnate after death, or is there another realm they stay in before they incarnate again? How does all of this work?

S.

Dear S.:

No one can answer these sorts of questions with any certainty. The best we can do is study what mystics have taught for ages and compare it to the information gathered by channelers and researchers who work with near-death experiencers and converse with souls via life between life regression. Of course, it also makes sense to study nature and ponder what resonates with us as true on a deep, soulful level.

First let’s address your question about the possibility that all the plants and animals perceived in other realms could be “self-created.” By this, I assume you are asking if it is possible that they only exist in our minds or if we create them in these realms via our imaginations. This is a strangely selective solipsism, for why would one believe that other people are real but all other creatures mere fantasies?

Since it’s impossible to prove that anyone or anything exists outside of ourselves, we have to rely on our gut feelings and intuition when deciding whether to believe that we are the creator of everything we experience or are part of an existence inhabited by other beings like ourselves. I have had some subjective experiences of being someone else that have led me to assume that other people exist, think and feel just like I do. For example, now and then I have dreams that I am someone else – someone who looks, lives, thinks and feels very differently than I do. I have also had very vivid dreams of an entirely different existence as a dolphin, which strengthen my view that we are living subjective lives in an objective world. Of course, according to quantum physicists, at some point it is impossible to distinguish between subjective and objective because the act of observation affects what is observed.

Besides these admittedly shaky reasons, it seems foolishly arrogant to assume that everything that exists was created by me and for me, and that none of the other individuals who appear to be doing the exact same thing are “real.” Nearly all esoteric teachings suggest that we are all part of something greater than ourselves and thus connected to All That Is – not that we are all there is. I would thus assume that the people, plants and animals encountered in the afterlife are not figments of one’s imagination.

Regarding what happens to plants and animals when they die, and if what happens is different from what happens to humans, I suppose the real question is if plants and animals have “souls” – some part of them that transcends their physical existence – and if they do, if those souls are fundamentally different somehow from human souls.

I believe both plants and animals have some aspect that transcends physical existence based on what I (and many others) have observed of their auras. Living plants and animals have auras like human beings do. When a plant is dying, its aura begins to fade, and when all the life force has drained from the plant, its aura disappears. The same is true of animals and human beings. While I don’t know of any research into the spirits of plants, it makes sense to me to assume that all living beings share the same cycles of life, death, and reincarnation.

There is a lot of evidence that animals have souls. If this wasn’t true, the spirits of animals would not be able to become earthbound like human spirits can. There have been stories about animal spirits and ghosts throughout the centuries and around the world. Most of these ghosts involve species that human beings tend to form personal relationships with such as cats, dogs, horses and birds. Just as a violent or sudden death can cause humans to become confused as to whether or not they are still incarnate in a particular body, the same can happen with animals. There is also a lot of anecdotal evidence to suggest that animals that form strong emotional bonds to human beings may remain close to people who are grieving for them for some time after they have died, just as the spirits of human beings sometimes do.

I’ve also heard many stories of pet owners who believe their departed pets returned to them reincarnated as a new pet. Some of these stories are very striking in terms of how these animals are similar to the former pet and how the owners were led to find them in their new forms.

There seems to be a continuum of consciousness with perhaps rocks and minerals at the bottom, followed by plants, then animals, then humans. Further, within the animal kingdom, one sees a great range of development, with dogs, cats, horses, primates and dolphins being some of the animals at the higher end of the spectrum. (My feeling is that dolphins may be even more evolved than humans, but more on dolphins below.)  It seems the more evolved an animal species is, the more natural it is for that species to develop an emotional relationship with human beings. This could easily be explained by vibration, for as a species moves closer to the human spectrum, it would naturally be drawn toward other creatures of a similar vibration.

Much past life, life between life, and near-death research suggests that as we evolve spiritually, we gain more and more free will. With more freedom comes a greater chance of getting lost, going astray, or refusing the guidance sent to us, which could affect how, when and where we reincarnate. This would explain why human beings and the more evolved animals can become ghosts, while other less evolved creatures may unconsciously flow with natural spiritual law.

There are some people who say that human beings are special and could never incarnate as a plant or animal, but I had a personal experience that leads me to believe otherwise. It began with a trip to Sea World in which I had some amazing telepathic experiences with dolphins, after which I began to have the most amazing, vivid “dreams” of being a dolphin myself. These were not normal dreams, for they felt entirely real: I had a dolphin body that I felt totally at home in, and personal relationships with other dolphins. It felt more joyful and free to be a dolphin than I’ve ever felt as a human being.

Given all of the above, my general concept of “how it all works” is thus: all life is constantly coming into being, dying, and being reborn again. Through these experiences, souls naturally evolve into higher states of consciousness and vibration. This occurs in an unconscious manner until a soul starts to develop self-awareness and free will, at which point it may begin to choose to veer in a consciously chosen direction or refuse to move forward for a time (as with earthbound spirits). Since all life begins in the spirit world and returns to the spirit world, all varieties of life found in the physical can be found on higher planes.

Soul Arcanum

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