The following is excerpted from Gift of the Body, published by the Essential Light Institute.
Part 1. Getting ready.
THERE YOU ARE, A RAY OF LIGHT IN FORM, surrounded by others of your kind. You are the student; they are your teachers. You are an about-to-be traveler; they are your travel agents, trip planners, and guides. You are a pilgrim; they are your family and friends, your crew sending you off into your next adventure. All of them have gathered to help you choose your next assignment, stoke your courage, and send you off with their blessings, love, and promises of help in your new home within a material body.
Among these attendants are members of your soul group, the ones who were soul-born with you and whose progress is intimately linked with yours. Over many lifetimes, you have traded-off lives with one another—serving various roles for one another—in the material world. Some in the soul-group will incarnate with you, making it possible for you to learn from one another the sometimes hard, but growth-filled, lessons that only interaction with the material world (and each other) can bring. This learning you will bring back to the soul-group when you return. Others will stay behind, holding the home fort, so to speak, radiating through the brave one walking through the earth plane with love, patience, and occasionally whispered advice. All have come to your send-off ceremony.
You are in a room of sorts, in front of a bank of screens of sorts. You are where you will soon call “the other side.” But, right now you call it home. On each screen is displayed a potential earthly life, complete with read-outs of location, culture, family configuration, familial functions and dysfunctions, the various talents and weaknesses that you will have in each potential life, the comforts and challenges you will encounter, and life-experience possibilities. Also in front of you is a basket in which there are many slips of paper. On these slips are written all of the lessons that you still need to learn in order to successfully complete your multi-life, earthly “study course,” before you move on to other realms of experience. Some of these lessons you simply haven’t gotten around to doing in previous lives. Many are “do-over” lessons—lessons that you have not fully mastered yet. The decision of which life you will drop into is a matter of choice; how much choice you have in the matter will depend on what lessons, based on your many prior go-rounds, you have already cleared out of your basket in previous lifetimes. The more lessons that you have already completed, the more choices you are awarded—i.e., the more freedom you have to choose in this moment.
The major decision that you will make right now is how many slips of paper you will draw out of the basket: One? Ten? The whole pile? This decision will clarify the other choices. Some of the screen-arrayed lives will be designed to stimulate only a few of the lessons, and some lives will rain lessons down upon you until you beg for mercy. The question is, what do you still need to learn about faith, mercy, and compassion, what do you need to glean from the experience of material existence, and what circumstances will best give you the opportunity to learn to wield the double-edged sword of free will with more finesse? And after all that, you need to decide to what depth are you ready to learn these lessons in your upcoming “course” in the School of Matter? All those considerations will go into the choice you make, into the moment when you point to one of the lives being displayed and say, “That one.”
The process of choosing takes as long as it takes. Time is not the same in this realm of light as it is where you are going, and the guides have all been through what you are contemplating, thousands of times, as have you. Timelessness breeds patience, and experience breeds compassion. Everyone involved knows that once the life has been entered, there is no turning back. A deal is a deal, and all the guides will conspire to make sure you complete your end of it. As much as you might wish to renegotiate the contract after you have awakened in the density of the womb (or the material world after your physical birth), the basic deal is that you will fulfill your contract one way or another. Every choice you make will contribute to your learning. Every lesson you complete will make the basket lighter. And every choice to avoid a given lesson will weigh the basket down. Furthermore, just to make it more interesting, you will do it—in that life journey—all by instinct. You will be mind-wiped before your descent, and will wake up a disoriented amnesiac, with only a longing to remind you that your real home is elsewhere.
Part 2. Departure.
The choices are made, recorded, and the contract is affirmed by all concerned. The agreement is one based on love and well-wishing. Your incarnation is not only for you. You will be the representative of the whole group, learning for yourself and for them. You promise to learn as best you can; the guides promise to back you up all the time and counsel you in key moments. Now you are ready to go. During the ceremony of departure, there is both a focused seriousness and a joy in everyone. The seriousness is because all present are sincerely pledging to fulfill their role in the upcoming program. You may be the protagonist in your own ensuing drama, but all of the players will have their roles to play as well, and all will be challenged as they fulfill their parts. A life on earth is a creative process on all levels. Some of the guides and soul group members will also incarnate, to appear in your life to aid you, and to be aided by you. Some of them may come to play roles that neither they nor you will enjoy. And some of them will stay behind in the spirit world, giving you radiated succor, counsel, and admonition, to whatever degree is possible—based upon the strict rules of engagement with the material world that non-incarnate beings must follow. Future links will be opened between you and your team through such altered states as dreaming, meditation, moments of ecstasy, as well as during times of emotional disturbance, and occasionally through the intervention of grace in crucial moments of choice. You will learn to listen to the quiet voice of your intuition, to read the symbols in your dreams, to see the clues to your life path offered in the words of strangers and in the eyes of children. Everyone involved knows that all communication will be conducted in hints and whispers, and that a completely unveiled, memory-returned reunion will only happen when the mission is complete.
Therefore, the joy in that send-off ceremony is because beloved you is off on an adventure that will not only try and challenge you, but will also give you the chance for advancement and growth. The beginnings of a journey are always filled with hope and optimism. And the earth plane is the ultimate school, the ultimate adventure, and the ultimate multi-textured, sensation-filled playground. The perspective of not having a physical body, and knowing that death is not real, makes even the anticipation of inevitable pain a minor consideration. From this shared perspective, it’s all good, since the journey is all about the learning.
Final instructions are imparted and blessings are given. A guide then taps you on the amnesia-inducing place, right under where your nose will be when you enter your body. And then as your memory starts to fade, (just as you will experience many times in your earthly life as you wake from a dream) you jump.
Part 3. Arrival.
When you wake up, you are in a universe of constriction and overwhelming sensation. You have been linked to a strange apparatus through an unimaginably intricate series of energetic links and circuits. Since you now have amnesia, this experience of embodiment is new to you, again. You feel a unique combination of comfort, fascination, fear, and wonder to find yourself hooked up in this way, and you immediately begin the process of acclimating yourself to this gizmo, and learning what it can do. You will get the hang of it over time, time that is marked by the beating of the clock in the center of what you will come to call your chest.
You wonder, what is this strange apparatus, this swirl of everchanging sensation, contained in this dense “suit” that you are joined with, but of which you are not in control? Even after this first encounter with embodied life, for a while you will come and go. You will travel for long periods through various inner planes, perhaps even visiting again your true home, and then returning to your new, temporary home to test out its uses, to make it gradually yours. Your amnesia prevents you from being overcome by awe and strangeness, and from panicking even more than you do. You vaguely remember something different than this bodily experience, but the job at hand is overwhelmingly engaging and interesting.
Gradually, you will gain some mastery over your body—this vehicle that has its own separate agenda. Gradually, you will negotiate an agreement with it. You will learn to cooperate in its feeding and cleaning and comforting. You will develop strategies to meet its other needs—needs that are based on comprehending the rules of the physical, emotional, and energetic environment that you now inhabit. It is a body that has been explicitly designed for you to live in and through which to engage the world that you have come to experience as a visiting student. In turn, this body will serve you in navigating this world. The fact that this body has been created optimally just for you, based on millions of years of experimentation, and that it has been developed for your exclusive program of study, is lost on you. You have just now showed up. Right now, you are just beginning to learn what you can and cannot do in this body. Wondering who gave it to you, why it was given to you, how it really works, and what all you can do with it, will come later.
You’re driving the coolest vehicle in the universe. And it’s a rental.
Since you have come so recently into density, for a while you continue to see and feel partly from a perspective beyond the narrow band of matter. When those who have been here longer observe you staring over their shoulders or above their heads, with your eyes focused on something they no longer see, with an amused smile on your constantly shifting little face, they may wonder and comment to each other: “What is the little one seeing?” If you are lucky, they will not shame and criticize this seeing out of you, and you will retain it for later use.
What you are seeing with your freshly-opened eyes is the totality of the many versions of your little contraption being used by those around you. But unlike these veterans, you are experiencing their apparatus with the totality of yours. You are feeling, seeing, sensing, hearing, tasting, touching, vibrating, expanding, and contracting in a broad band of multi-leveled interaction. It makes your new mouth smile, it makes your body giggle, and it makes you stare through your eyes in delight. Sometimes it frightens you.
It scares you when you see tense, unsmiling faces floating in the air above you, or when you see disturbing, dark streaks surrounding those who are peering down at you. You are still seeing and feeling beyond the physical world, watching the patterns of light, the interweaving strands of pulsation that surround the densest part of a human being—the part that those-who-have-been-here-longer will later try to convince you is all there is to your being. While the ones who tower over you are feeling enchanted or angry or happy or disturbed as they interact with you, you are fluidly responding—smiling or crying—as the patterns of color and intensity are shifting and flowing, expanding and contracting, caressing you or scaring you. You are already seeing, feeling, sensing, and intuitively resisting the further narrowing of the boundaries of reality, a reality that has been constructed out of collective images and/or thought-forms that have made the atmosphere you now breathe and the world you now inhabit. It is a construct that those who have long forgotten their real home have wrapped themselves in, in order to navigate and maintain this world. Like waking from, or this case, into a dream, you retain some sense of where you came from, of the openness, the lightness, the absence of so much weight from emotion and opinion. You will eventually adjust to this reality, more or less, depending on the lessons you came to learn and the choices you make. You will eventually wear some version of that same definition of reality. It may come to feel like comfortable set of loose-fitting, flowing clothes. And/or it may feel like a scratchy wool blanket on a hot day.
But for now, so recently arrived, you can still see who these forgetful huge ones really are, their true selves winking at you like stars peeking through clouds. Of course, you love them completely and unconditionally. They make you smile. They’re funny, beautiful, scary, and alive. Judgment and categorization will come later.
Gradually, your eyes will learn to narrow their focus. You will learn to pay more proscribed attention, ignoring most of what you now see and feel, defining reality according to implicitly understood limits. Mostly, you will just know what is OK to say and see and feel. And if you don’t intuitively get what you should not be talking about—in terms of what you are seeing and feeling that nobody else is seeing and feeling, then in order to have your vision narrowed—you may end up being told that you are crazy, or that you are making people uncomfortable, or that you will never be successful in this world. Maybe you will even end up getting ridiculed or punished until your natural vision and feelings are squeezed off. Therefore, in time, you learn to no longer pay attention to all that you are seeing and feeling; you make this seemingly necessary adjustment, because of your need to survive.
However, in spite of this adjustment, your inner being will never quite lose that little smile. Somewhere deep inside you, you will always remember. No matter how thick the blinders of acceptability are that get put in place, the permanent-you inside of the temporary-you will always retain the truth, knowing that there is more to this body and the world it inhabits than meets the narrow-focused eye. That inner you will always be waiting to re-emerge, quietly reminding you of what is possible. Later on, the persistence of that reminder may even begin to ‘rattle your cage’ in the form of restlessness, or illness, or life-crisis.
Teaser image by Jone, courtesy of Creative Commons license.
