The following is excerpted from from Psychic Psychology: Energy Skills for Life and Relationships, published by North Atlantic Books.
We
want to discuss an idea of reincarnation that we expect will be new to our
readers. We find that this understanding places desire in a reassuring light
and helps explain the very nature of our desires, allowing us to relax and be
open to life as it is.
Most readers of this book can easily imagine that the soul
exists eternally. Most readers then find it comforting that whatever they're suffering,
all their experience has meaning for the soul. Some people, however, say, "No.
What good does it do me, the personality? I suffer and die. My experience is
used by my soul, but I am not there as Jack or Donna or whoever. How does it
help me if the soul makes meaning out of my personal suffering?" While it does
help you as a personality when the soul makes meaning of your suffering,
answering that question would take us off track for this book. Instead, we
address the underlying assumption that the personality ends at or shortly after
death with the breakdown of the physical and psychic vehicles that composed the
personality.
This assumption is, perhaps, universal amongst psychics and
mystics, and it is consistent with much of what one sees clairvoyantly in
watching the dissolution process after death when you look at the process along
one direction of time. When you look in multiple directions you see something
dramatically different.
Your soul doesn't gobble up the personality or strip it like a
wreck for parts. Not only is the personality's experience gathered and embraced
by the soul, the personality itself continues to grow after death, as itself, in
the embrace of the soul and in the embrace of even larger consciousnesses than
the soul. The personality continues to exercise its own will and uniqueness
with recognizably human characteristics (though no physical body) even as it
also grows in ways marvelously different from the embodied human consciousness
or ego consciousness that we all presently know. The soul completely absorbs
the experience of the personality and reorganizes that experience to be
unrecognizable by the old personality. The concept that the personality could
be ongoing in another direction to freely continue exploring, as itself,
violates our normal notions that something can only be one thing at a time.
Multidirectional time allows the personality's experience to go in multiple
directions at once, and to exist in many forms at once-one form integrated
unrecognizably in the soul, other forms as part of larger consciousnesses, and at
least one recognizable as the personality as it knows itself.
Seth pointed to this continuation of the personality in a class
Jane Roberts gave on May 15, 1971, in which he spoke about his own physical incarnations,
detailing one incarnation in particular — his incarnation as a minor pope of the
Catholic Church around 300 CE. Seth indicated that he could not remember the details
of his life as pope. He could, however, get a more accurate rendering of the
details by checking with his past incarnation, the pope. Seth indicated that
while getting the details was possible, it was not worth the effort at the
time, since that pope, a past life of his/Seth's, was off doing other things.
"But as I now recall them, without directly checking on our friend the pope,
who has, you must understand, gone his own way…."
John remembers noticing this statement, as well as several
others, in Seth Speaks, but the
significance of Seth's clear indication that the personality continues didn't
register for John until John observed the afterdeath continuation and
extraordinary growth of someone he had known in life.
John's first observation of this continuation was in the early
'90s and concerned a dear friend. In February 1976, John's friend and fellow
Seth class member, Will Ives, committed suicide. In a meditation in the early '90s,
John saw a beautiful violet ribbon of light. As he observed and interacted with
the beautiful ribbon of light John noticed that it contained the consciousness
of Will. It was Will, the old Will,
just much happier. John had earlier observed that Will had already reincarnated
twice, but this Will was not a later incarnation who had gobbled up John's
friend Will — this was Will with John's friend's memories and flavorings. This was
the Will that John had known: wiser, with a deep serenity and joyousness, participating
in something John couldn't then follow.
Over time John's communication with and perception of Will has
expanded. Today John easily communicates with Will as Will. He also can
perceive Will ecstatically participating in several gestalt consciousnesses: a
few huge, a few small explorations, and at least one person-toperson, i.e., the
one where Will communicates with John. In some way, while honoring boundaries,
Will sees through and is affected by John's experience, and vice versa. Will
became what we call a co-personality
to John, which we will explain over the next few pages.
After
Death
Here's
what the authors see as the normal after-death process. Please understand that
the creativity and multidimensionality of this process render all accounts
simplifications. Physical death occurs and the personality moves into higher
planes of energy. If this is the soul's final incarnation, the soul itself
moves into a higher energy range than it had occupied, reconfigures itself with
the last personality being vitally important, and engages in continued
evolution. For example, the late Jane Roberts, who was the final life of her
soul, has become an integral part of a large entity that acts as a guide
(primarily in the dream state) for numerous people simultaneously.
If the deceased personality is not the soul's final incarnation,
the personality gives a copy of all its experience to the soul. The personality
has several additional avenues to pursue its own further growth. Even though the
personality eventually loses all the earthly vehicles that had held it together
and supported its individuality in life, the personality continues to be held
together by at least three sources: its soul, by even larger beings, and by an
individualized spark that it received from All That Is when it initially
incarnated.
After death the personality continues to train with guides and
explore its new environment. After engaging in various trainings and
explorations, most personalities have a set of questions and challenges that
they personally take back into the reincarnational process (again, without
losing themselves in the incarnation, see below). For example, if the
personality in physical life was narrowly intellectual and arrogant about its
intellect, it might choose to explore a lifetime with less intellect to
experience the validity of such a life and to learn how to live skillfully with
having a lower status.
The personality will never again have another physical lifetime
that is exactly like the physicality it once experienced. Instead there is an
amazing way in which it becomes a co-personality in other incarnations, actively
participating as itself, just a slight energy distance away from the energy
field of the new physical incarnation. The personality collaborates with its
soul, All That Is, and other larger beings, as well as some other personalities
from its soul's other incarnations, to form a new "baby being." The baby being
is comprised of its own spark of uniqueness from All That Is, of challenges and
questions arising from the multiple past incarnations, and of projects bestowed
by the soul itself and other larger beings that gave birth to it. From now on
this being has its own spark and initiatives even while it is a part of others
greater than itself. It, too, will live as a human and then continue eternally,
both as itself and as a part of other greater energy gestalts, especially as a
part of its soul. The baby being's psychic DNA is formed out of the desires
that gave it birth. It will be motivated by those desires. In a way hard to
understand given our existence in linear time, the baby being, through its own
divine spark, gets to choose, in an important sense, the desires that give it
birth. The nature of the baby being's creation and birth sheds light on the
nature of desire and the challenges that all humans face.
The
Co-Personality
Remember
the narrowly intellectual and arrogant personality whose after-death adventure
we proposed above. Let's call him Daniel. Daniel wanted to explore a life with
less intellect and lower status in order to develop compassion and to learn a
simple happiness. After death, Daniel consults with other personalities of the
soul, with the soul itself, with guides, with other souls that may want to
interact with him in his next incarnation, and with All That Is. Together they
plan a new incarnation, a new baby being whom we'll call Beth. Daniel, who took
part in planning the Beth incarnation, does not get lost in the Beth baby being
but participates in the new incarnation from a nearby energy platform that's part
of Beth's subconscious mind. He will be what we call a co-personality. Other
personalities from his soul will also participate as co-personalities from an
energy distance. Their environment will not be structured in simple linear time
as is Beth's physical reality in her new incarnation. Instead, each past
personality will experience a vibrant, engrossing, somewhat dreamlike
environment. Each personality, like Daniel, will seem to be the center of his
or her own experience. Daniel affects and is affected by Beth. And each has
free will. One could say that the new incarnation of Beth's becomes an aspect
of Daniel's reality, part of Daniel's subconscious mind, just as Daniel is an
aspect of Beth's incarnation, an aspect of her subconscious mind. The new
incarnation, Beth, will be fully free to accept, in part or in whole, or to
reject altogether the sensory, emotional, and intellectual responses of her
co-personalities, including Daniel.
Daniel will engage only the times in Beth's life relevant to his
own unfinished, unassimilated experience. Eventually Daniel obtains enough
experience to move to his next question, and the process is initiated again as
a co-personality to a new incarnation. Again a new baby being is formed. Let's
call him Christopher. And again Daniel becomes a portion of Christopher's
subconscious; Daniel affects and is affected by Christopher, and each exercises
free will in their respective energy vehicles. Eventually Daniel answers his
questions sufficiently so that he moves forward to the stage that John's friend
Will now experiences: nondual awareness.
Every personality is eventually redeemed through this process,
even if its actions and physical life were cruel and repellent. In the case of extreme
cruelty it could take a million years on another planet before the personality
is redeemed, but eventually every personality is able to function fully in the
realm of nondual divine play.
Returning again to Beth, the baby being created out of the
questions of Daniel, it is the very nature of Beth to want to know how to be
happy while being less intellectual and having a lower status than her soul's incarnations
had in recent (earlier) lives. In multidimensional time, we, the personality,
choose the life situation into which we will be born for the adventure it
offers. This is hard to understand from our normal experience of time — how can we
choose before we exit? In multidimensional time we do choose before we exit,
and we feel free to choose challenges, knowing that ultimately all our actions
will be redeemed as we expand eternally as a personality. Understanding this
helps us understand why we engage life as we do with the strength and
weaknesses that we have, and reassures us that we can and eventually will
experience a wholeness that every bit of prior experience contributes to in its
own unique way.
A few personalities move, with minimal further training, fairly
directly to the Unity level (where John's deceased friend Will is centered),
which most personalities don't reach until much further along in their
experience. The personality goes to the Unity level only if it has no major unfinished
business.
For example, personalities who come at the end of a lengthy
series of their soul's lifetimes (in which the soul investigated an issue in
depth) might be relatively complete at death, even if the soul has other issues
to investigate. An example might be a soul that explored issues of war and anger,
having multiple lives as a combatant at various levels of rank, for various
ideologies, and in various styles of combat; and also as a noncombatant affected
by the wars, in some lives adversely, and in some lives by being liberated, as
many slaves were in the Civil War, or other advantageous ways; lives as war
hawks and others as doves; and many lives learning how to deal with anger in
daily life, again sometimes as the aggressor and sometimes as the recipient.
Perhaps the last life in this series could be one where the incarnated
personality is especially good at addressing anger — say, a hospital
administrator confronting the turmoil of patients and their families and
conflicts over insurance. Such a person might be relatively complete at the end
of their life and ready to move rapidly to the nondual awareness of Unity.
Yet another type of person in our experience who goes relatively
directly to nondual reality is someone who attains fearlessness in meeting the
world as it is. John had a client who died of ALS (commonly known as Lou
Gehrig's disease). He spent his last year or so in the world-famous healing
community of John of God. A few months prior to his death he told his wife that
he had never been happier. It took only about five years in John's time for
this gentleman to make his way to the Unity level. His soul may still have many
more lifetimes to complete, but this particular personality was ready to move
almost directly to the Unity level.
Copyright © 2011 by John
Friedlander and Gloria Hemsher, reprinted by permission of publisher.
Teaser image by Thompson sa, courtesy of Creative Commons license.
