The thing is, our soul never dies. Our personalities come and go but our soul endures. The older the soul the more experience imprints the character of the soul and these imprints create complications and complexities in each successive life of the personality. That is to say, each time the soul incarnates into a new person there is a residual effect from past life experiences that the soul carries into the new life.
Think of it like a meal. The more experienced the chef the more complex and interesting the layers of flavor in a dish.
I think it has to be this way. It is part of our path toward enlightment. At some point we will have fears or idiosyncrasies that our personality cannot explain within the context of our current life. This will prompt an opening in our inquisitive mind that just might lead us to explore the possibility of past life and karmic effects on our current situation.
I have believed in past lives and karma for many years but I have just this past week had an experience of my most recent past life, that has – at least in this life, awakened me to who I truly am more than any other singular event.
As it turns out, my previous incarnation was infamous. No, not famous. I wasn’t anyone, anyone would wish to be, but her relative infamy created a paper trail. She was murdered in 1836 and there was a trial. I was able to find letters she had written and articles written about her. When I was reading about her, I did not feel like I was reading about someone that I knew. Except ever so often I would get a glimpse of myself in her writing, descriptions of her demeanor, the description of the things she surrounded herself with in her bedroom. In those glimpses, I saw a golden thread – a thread from that life to the current life that I know so well. That thread of Me who transcends time and space. That knowing of myself that I find in deep meditation. It has been a profound experience to read about my last life, to know my previous name. To know that the personality in that time and place is not me and so it follows that the personality of this time and place is not wholly me either, it is temporary. I am more than my current incarnation, I am also a soul who endures throughout time and space – the golden thread that connects back through all of those lives is the I, that I am. As I have witnessed my own incarnating and evolving soul this past week, I know that my higher self that resides behind the veil of time and space is also making equal evolutionary progress. As within, so without. As my material self grows, so does my higher self and one day we will align in such a knowing way that we will become one and I will achieve enlightenment. I only hope I can get there in this lifetime so that I do not have to risk forgetting again in my next re-birth. I’m getting old you see and my idiosyncrasies and scars are great – it’s exhausting.
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