Reincarnation: One Soul, Many Returns

Spirituality is a powerful term encompassing a way of thinking about, feeling, and living in the world. Essential to spiritual life is mindful thinking and experiencing the many different aspects of human existence and conscious interaction with others and our environment. With a spiritual view of life, we can see the divine in the mundane, the miraculous in each and every day, the extraordinary in the ordinary.

This article will explore the concept of reincarnation, which is the idea that we have a single soul that enters, and more importantly, re-enters the incarnated life over a succession of lifetimes to learn all the lessons of human consciousness, which takes thousands upon thousands of years.

The Fundamental Idea of Reincarnation

Human consciousness wants to learn, experience, and evolve.  In a single lifetime, we certainly experience a lot.  Take just one concept, love.  We learn about love as part of our developing psyche as children; we experience it first from our parents, and then it evolves as we grow and mature. We discover the love of friendships and the love intermingled with romance and sex. We try to do our best to find and enjoy as much love as we can.

But a single lifetime is rather limiting when it comes to learning as much as we can or “all that there is” to know about love. Some forms of love we will never know.  Say, your grandparents died before you were born.  If so, you will never know that particular version of love.  All kinds of real-life limitations will make certain forms of love impossible to know in one lifetime.  If you want to know all the forms of love, then you will have to plan to come back and re-visit the incarnated life, over and over and over again.

If you are a man in this lifetime, you will want to return as a woman in another lifetime to find out about love in a different gender.  What about love across all the cultures of the world?  One lifetime will simply not get it done.  Understanding that your soul persists after death and returns to this plane of existence, and has done so, perhaps for millenniums would radically shift your world view if you ascribe to atheism or one of the many theisms that posits eternal damnation or salvation after just one go-around on the planet.

• Mind & Body Harmony

Proof of Reincarnation

More and more documentation of scientifically minded efforts to explore reincarnation appear yearly.  Hypnosis work is perhaps the most common tool to access past life information, pioneered in the current era by Dr. Michael Newton.

More and more case studies, like books, appear where children recount remarkable detail about times and places they could not describe with their level of development or life experience. Children Who Remember Previous Lives: A Question of Reincarnation by Ian Stevenson, MD and Life Before Life: Children’s Memories of Previous Lives by Jim Tucker, MD) are just two of many books on the subject written by accredited medical doctors.

Déjà Vu, Soul Mates, Easy Talents, and Irrational Fears

In our own personal journey through life, we probably encounter various experiences that will let us clue into our own reincarnated journey.

Déjà Vu

The phrase translates to “already seen” and describes the feeling that you have already lived through or “seen” a situation you are currently experiencing.  This feeling can happen anywhere, though travel might be one of the best and most common examples.  You could be visiting another part of the country or another part of the world and come to a location that just “feels familiar”.

You may even surprise yourself by knowing how to get around, not needing the help of a map or needing to ask for directions.  The location feels like a place you have been before even though you have never been there in your current life.  This feeling can also occur when performing a task or having a certain conversation about a subject with a particular person.

Soul Mates and Twin Flames

When it comes to love and relationships, we all eventually encounter the idea of soul mates, and more recently, twin flames.  These are people we feel a soul-to-soul connection, something far beyond shared cultural values, ethnicity, and mundane similarities.  Something about a soul mate touches us on a spiritual and reincarnated level.

Soul Mates do not have to be lovers; we can have soul mates who are friends and we can have a soul family, which may or may not show up as actual family members in this incarnation. The twin flame is the singular “other half” of our soul, which is believed to be split in two at the start of our incarnated journey.  Our work, over many, many lifetimes is to eventually reconnect the split half and become whole again.

• The Truth About Twin Flames

Easy Talents

Have you ever tried something for the first time and just been good at it “out of the gate” or in remarkably short order?  Has some kind of knowledge just been easy for you to understand at sophisticated levels with little effort or time invested?  If so, there is a good chance you did all the developmental work in other lifetimes.

When I started exploring esoteric subjects, I looked at everything from astrology to tarot to palm reading to runes and on and on.  Of the many subjects, I explored tarot card reading simply came easy to me and I now do the work professionally.  I can read using multiple different decks and with a fluidity that goes beyond just my many years of study.  Astrology is another tool that just makes sense, while palm reading and rune casting and so many others feel like starting from scratch when I engage them.

Irrational Fears

We all have common fears; nobody wants to encounter a poisonous spider, be caught in a fire, or otherwise face harm that can end our lives or hurt us significantly.  Many fears that are intense come from experiences in this life that create those very fears.  Perhaps we were caught in a house fire we escaped as a child or an adult.  But what if we did not have such an experience in this life, but we have the level of fear of someone who did experience such events.

I happen to have an irrational fear of the ocean, I do not have any desire to swim in or travel in a ship across it.  In this life, nothing bad has ever happened to me in or on the ocean, but nonetheless I will only visit the beach and get in the water up to my knees or waist.  I appreciate the shore, the sunrises, and sunsets, but really do not want to get in the water.  I wondered about this intense reaction and did a past life regression that revealed one of my deaths occurred when I drown in the ocean.

Often a regression experience is somehow tied to and important to our current lives.  In some future life, I may work through the past life issue, but my take on it for this current lifetime is to keep my feet firmly on the ground and plan my sailing days for some future incarnation.  Join me next month for more thoughts on reincarnation and your many returns to this earthly plane.