Journey of Souls (30 page)

S: (impatiently) Yes, I did that, but I don’t want them.

Dr. N: Wait a minute. What if you liked a music student in Oslo, but wanted to live in New York City?

S: (laughs) As a matter of fact, there is a promising girl in Los Angeles, but I still want New York.

Dr. N: All right, move forward. As your time in the Ring draws to a close, give me the details of your probable life selection.

S: I am going to New York to be a musician. I’m still trying to make up my mind between a couple of people, but I think I will choose (stops to laugh) a dumpy kid with a lot of talent. His body won’t have the stamina of my last one, but I’ll have the advantage of parents with some money who will encourage me to practice, practice, practice.

Dr. N: Money is important?

S: I know I sound … grasping … selfish … but there was no money in my last life. If I want to express the beauty of music and give pleasure to myself and others, I need proper training and supportive parents, otherwise I’ll get sidetracked … I know myself.

Dr. N: If you didn’t like any of the options presented to you in the Ring, could you ask for more places and people to look at?

S: It isn’t necessary, at least for me. I’m offered enough.

Dr. N: Let me be more blunt. If you are supposed to select a life from only the selections shown you in the Ring, how do you know the coordinators aren’t stacking the deck against you? Maybe they are programming you to make certain choices?

S: (pause) I don’t think so, considering all the times I have come to the Ring. We don’t go unless our minds are made up as to the type of life we want to live, and I’ve always had interesting choices based upon my own ideas.

Dr. N: Okay, after you are completely finished with reviewing lives in the Ring, what happens then?

S: The controllers … come into my mind to see if I am satisfied with what I have been shown.

Dr. N: Are they always the same entities?

S: I think so … as far back as I can remember.

Dr. N: Do they pressure you to make a decision before leaving the Ring?

S: Not at all. I float out and go back to talk to my companions before making up my mind.

Of course, theaters such as the Ring are not limited to viewing our planet. I have shown how some souls who come to Earth enjoy incarnating on other worlds as well. In Chapter Ten, I explained how the space of transformation within the spirit world allows souls to experiment with all sorts of shapes and forms for enlightenment and short-term recreation. However, for purposes of actual incarnation into our universe and other dimensions my subjects tell me there are space-time tunnels, or channels, available near their group centers. (Later, Case 29 will describe what it feels like to go through one of them at rebirth).

People say these portals are symbolized by a line of huge archways for passage similar to a large train station. One woman put it this way, “We see these openings as lighter or darker voids of space. To me, the lighter tunnels denote more interactive communities of beings. The darker fields lead to low-density mental colonies where I am going to be alone a lot more.” When I asked her for an example of the latter, she said, “On the world of Arnth, we are as balls of cotton candy moving on waves of gas where nothing is solid. The swirling around each other is very orgasmic.” Another subject, describing his entry into a lighter opening said, “Sometimes between human incarnations I go with groups of souls to the fire world of Jesta. In this volcanic atmosphere we can experience the physical and emotional stimulation of becoming intelligent molecules of flame. Now I know why I love to be in temperatures of over 100 degrees on Earth”

A soul’s physical anchorage is important. Case 25 told us his choice of locations was confined to four cities. The number of scenes souls preview before a new life is, of course, different for each visit. Individual life offerings are selective, which indicates to me that other spiritual entities have

been actively working on our behalf to set up location scenes before we arrive. The number of specialist spirits who assist souls at the space of life selection never seems to be large. They appear as rather vague apparitions to my subjects, although most believe members of their Council of Elders and personal guides are involved.

Early in human history, when the world was underpopulated, my clients recall lives where they were always born in sparse human settlements. In time, with the rise of villages and then larger centers of ancient civilizations, my cases report returning to the same areas. Life selections were geographically scattered again by the great migrations of people colonizing new lands, particularly in the last four hundred years. In this century of overpopulation, more souls are choosing to live in places where they have been before.

Does this tendency today mean souls want to return to the same countries because of race? Souls are not inclined toward life selections based on ethnicity or nationalism. These products of human separatism are taught in childhood. Aside from the comfortable familiarity of culture in a soul’s choice (which is different from racial bias), we must also factor in the affinity many spirits have for deserts, mountains, or the sea. Souls may also have a preference for rural or urban living.

Are souls drawn back to the same geographic areas because they want a new life with the same family they had in their past life? The tradition among certain cultures, such as Native Americans, is that souls choose to stay within family bloodlines. A dying man is expected to come back as his own unborn grandchild. In my practice I rarely see souls repeating the same genetic choices in past lives because this would inhibit growth and opportunity.

Once in awhile I hear about a soul returning to the body of a relative in a former life under unusual karmic circumstances. For example, if a brother and sister had a close affinity for each other, and one were to die suddenly while still young, the soul of the dead sibling might want to return in the surviving sibling’s child to restore this broken life connection to finish an important task.

What is even more common in my experience, are the souls of young children who die soon after birth and then return to the same parents as the soul of their next baby. These plans are all made in advance by the souls participating in tragic family events. They involve a maze of karmic issues. Not long ago, I had a case where my client had died from a birth defect early in

his last life. I asked, “What was the purpose of your life ending when you were only a few days old?” He replied, “The lesson was for my parents, not me, and that’s why I elected to come back for them as a filler.” When souls return for a short life to help someone else rather than work on their own issues, because there isn’t time, some call this “a filler life.” In this case, the parents had abused and finally caused the death of another child when they were together in an earlier life. Although they were a loving young couple in the last life of my client, these parents evidently needed to experience the grief of having a child they desperately wanted taken away from them. Experiencing the anguish from this terrible loss gave the souls of these parents a deeper insight into the effects of severing a blood bond. I will have an example of this theme in Case 27.

Spirits do not routinely see their deaths in future lives. If souls choose a life where their death will be premature, they often see it in the place of life selection. I have found that souls essentially volunteer in advance for bodies who will have sudden fatal illnesses, are to be killed by someone, or come to an abrupt end of life with many others from a catastrophic event. Souls who become involved in these tragedies are not caught in the wrong place at the wrong time with a capricious God looking the other way. Every soul has a motive for the events in which it chooses to participate. One client told me his last life was planned in advance to end at seven years of age as an American Indian boy. He said, “I was looking for a short-burst lesson in humility and this life as a mistreated starving half-breed was enough.”

Another, more graphic example of a soul volunteering for a terrible assignment was that of one of my subjects who elected in her last life to join (with three others of her soul group) the bodies of Jewish women taken from Munich into the death camp at Dachau in 1941. All were assigned to the same barracks (also prearranged) where my client died in 1943 at age 18 comforting the children and trying to help them survive. Her mission was accomplished with courage.

While events, race, culture, and geographic location often appear to come first in the selection process, they are not the most significant choices for the soul’s next life. Aside from all other considerations, incarnation comes down to souls making that all-important decision of a specific body, and what can be learned by utilizing the brain of a certain human being. The next chapter is devoted to an analysis of why souls choose their bodies for various biological and psychological reasons.

IN the place of life selection, our souls preview the life span of more than one human being within the same time cycle. When we leave this area, most souls are inclined toward one leading candidate presented to us for soul occupation. However, our spiritual advisors give us ample opportunity to reflect upon all we have seen in the future before making a final decision. This chapter is devoted to the many elements which go into that decision.

Our deliberations over body alternatives actually begin before we go to the place of life selection. Souls do this in order to adequately prepare themselves for viewing certain people in different cultural settings on Earth. I sense those souls who set up the screening room know in advance what to show us, because of these thoughts in our minds. Great care must be taken in choosing just the right body to serve us in the life to come. As I have said, guides and peer group members are part of this evaluation process prior to, and after, we visit the place of life selection.

When listening to my subjects describe all the preparations which go into picking a new physical body, I am constantly reminded of the fluidity of spiritual time. Our teachers use relative future time in the place of life selection to allow souls to measure human usefulness for working on unfinished lesson plans. Blueprints for the next life vary in the degree of difficulty the soulmind sets for itself. If we have just come off an easy life, making little interpersonal progress, our soul might want to choose a person in the next time cycle who will face heartache and perhaps tragedy. It is not out of the ordinary for me to see someone who has skated through an

unchallenging life overloading themselves with turmoil in the next one to catch up with their learning goals.

The soulmind is far from infallible as it works in conjunction with a biological brain. Regardless of our soul level, being human means we will all make mistakes and have the necessity of engaging in midcourse corrections during our lives. This will be true with any body we select.

Before taking up the more complex mental factors in a soul’s decision to join with the brain of a human baby, I will begin with the physical aspects of body choice. Despite the fact that our souls know in advance what they are going to look like, a national survey in the United States indicated 90 percent of both males and females were dissatisfied with the physical characteristics of their bodies. This is the power of conscious amnesia. Much unhappiness is created by society stereotyping an ideal appearance. Yet, this too is part of a soul’s lesson plan.

How many times have we all looked in a mirror and said; “Is this the real me? Why do I appear this way? Am I in a body where I belong?” These questions are especially poignant when the type of body we have prevents us from doing those things we think we ought to be able to do in life. I have had a number of clients who came to me convinced their bodies prevented them from achieving satisfying lives.

Many handicapped people think if it were not for a genetic mistake, or being the victim of an accidental injury which damaged their body, their lives would be more fulfilled. As heartless as this may sound, my cases show few real accidents involving body damage which don’t fall under the free will of souls. As souls, we choose our bodies for a reason. Living in a damaged body does not necessarily have to involve a karmic debt we are paying off because of past life responsibility for an injury to someone else. As my next case will demonstrate, when a soul is inside a damaged body, this choice can involve a learning path to another type of lesson.

It is difficult to tell a newly-injured person trying to cope with physical disablement that he or she has an opportunity to advance at a faster rate than those of us with healthy bodies and minds. This knowledge must come through self-discovery. The case histories of my clients convince me that the effort necessary to overcome a body impediment does accelerate advancement. Those of us whom society deems less-than-perfect suffer discrimination which makes the burden even heavier. Overcoming the obstacles of physical ailments and hurt makes us stronger for the ordeal.

Our bodies are an important part of the trial we set for ourselves in life. The freedom of choice we have with these bodies is based far more on psychological elements than from the estimated 100,000 genes inherited by each human being. However, I want to show in the opening case of this chapter why souls want certain bodies based largely on physical reasons without heavy psychological implications. The case exhibits the planning involved in the decision of a soul to be in contrasting physical bodies in different lives. After this case, we will examine why souls choose their bodies for other reasons.

Case 26 was a tall, well-proportioned woman who enjoyed participating in sports despite being bothered all her life with recurring leg pains. During her preliminary interview, I learned the pain was a dull ache in both legs, about midway down the thighbones. Over a period of years she had been to a number of doctors who could find no medical evidence of anything wrong with her legs. Clearly, she was worn down and willing to try anything for relief.