At the end of last year, I wrote an article on the final What the Bleep newsletter. It had several articles on past lives, including Knowing You’ve Lived Before by Martin Vieweg and Nancy Seifer.
The article began a correspondence with the authors and I ended up reading their book, When the Soul Awakens. The book offers a different perspective on the process, including an interesting take on global history and politics and some great background on people such as Leo Tolstoy. The book is rich with examples I was unfamiliar with. One forgets what a profound effect spiritual experience and awakening has had on our culture, politics, and history.
The framework behind the book is basically Theosophy but the authors were not constricted to that work. When I explored a bit of Theosophy many years ago, I found some of it fascinating but I didn’t really resonate with some of the models, even stuff I’d experienced myself. It seemed a little too structured and analytical, thick going. Lost in the details.
This book does not have that issue at all. It has a clarity I find refreshing in the field and I was surprised they had not used a professional editor.
There are a few things in it I don’t agree with. And there are a few things I describe differently. For example, I differentiate soul and Self. And I avoid some terminology like dimensions and planes as I find them misleading. But the underlying message was not lost in such secondary ideas as many are prone to be.
The book touches on some less well known details I’ve touched on elsewhere here, like our return to a level of awareness not seen for over 13,000 years. And a few points I had not considered before, like past lives showing up after soul awakening. (an article on this will follow)
The book is focused on the initial waking process, but does talk briefly about higher initiations, roughly what I call states of consciousness. It’s framed as a series of tasks and tests which I consider a little too literal but it’s still a worthwhile study.
If you have studied Blavatsky and Alice Bailey and wish to understand it better from an awakening perspective, this is a great book. If you’ve not studied them but wish a flavour of that perspective, it’s also a good book although it’s more about awakening than Theosophy. An interesting read in any case.
Quite a bit of further material is available on their web site, including chapter excerpts.
http://www.whenthesoulawakens.org/
The book is available through their web site and from Amazon.com
Last Updated on September 20, 2023 by Davidya
Davidya,
If there is no such thing as ‘things’, the existence of which is determined by the mental creation of illusory boundaries, how is it possible that ideas such as past lives and souls can be true in anyway?
If the idea of a ‘self’ is false then there is no individual. Furthermore, there are no individuals or entities or things anywhere, only life in it’s totality.
I get that each ‘seeming’ individual is a reflection of the whole and in this way it would seem that each ‘seeming individual’ would have access to ALL past lives that have ever been.
So, the idea that an individual has past lives that are unique to that individual can only be false.
It would be possible for two or more people to ‘recall’ the same life, would it not?
Even then, i doubt whether such a thing can even be true.
It implies, on some level, that there is a soul/essense which exists between lives. If the individual is a process of false identification (not a thing) then the existence of a soul is an impossiblity.
We are meat and no more, but that meat is actually spirit in disguise.
Thanks
Kris
Hi Kris
The trick with getting clear on some of these ideas is in avoiding mixing perspectives. Each state of consciousness sees such things as “soul” differently, leading to apparent mixed messages. What is true or false shifts. Yet one reality remains.
hmm – in a nutshell…
First thing to understand is that there are layers to ‘mind’. Layers to what is created and by ‘whom’. Soul is an intention of God’s mind, the world is group mind, and our ego is an intention of local mind. Local mind masks higher values but the experience filters through.
You exist as an entity so must have been intended. That intention or spark of divinity or increment of wholeness is the soul or jiva.
The illusion is not in that you exist but that you exist as a separate entity. The ‘false identification’ is with our experiences rather than our source. And yes, there is a state of consciousness where even God’s dream ergo the soul is seen as an illusion, but that’s a transitional stage before duality is fully unified.
A wave on the ocean is a good analogy. Part of the whole and never separate but differentiated to create variety. Consciousness creates for the unexpressed to know itself. That requires a movement into events that can be experienced. The infinite collapses into a point of attention, you.
In order to experience each aspect of expression, time arises. Time moves in cycles. We experience a series of ‘things’ then the chapter ends and we experience a new chapter in a new framework. We have an apparent linear series of lives. When the need to experience linearly begins to end, we can experience that all of these lives and experiences happened only in the moment. Essentially all at once. I tried to illustrate that a bit with the recent post All Life in the Moment.
None of these perspectives is wrong – that’s ego talk. They are just expressions of different stages. The ego is necessary at a certain point for the person to differentiate itself from the whole. To go further into the detail.
I’ve also touched on the false causality such that when we release major holdings, the mesh of events collapses and our ‘past’ changes. History is revisionist.
When we step back into the ocean deeply enough, we can experience other lives from other “soul chains”. There is no longer a linear aspect. I talked about this like being able to shuffle through a deck of cards and choose whatever life you wish to experience. Where and when.
But we’re still one at a time. God is experiencing it all at once. And not just the billions of lives in our universe. But all universes.
Seeing it all as spirit creating a “meat suit” (as MIB would put it) misses everything in between. That’s where the richness of life is found. A small part of that is our own astonishing history. When the cycle of time swings up as it’s doing now, life is a very different experience. We’re coming to a time when we’ll be experiencing legends come to life.
A good example here is the nature of Maya or illusion. When inertia is dominant, Maya acts as a covering. When energy is dominant, Maya acts as an illusion. When purity is dominant, Maya becomes the the ladder home.
We may call time and the past an illusion. Or we may call it a way for us to know, to feel, to experience. To flow the divine into a point, then back to infinity.
Curiously enough, the difference is not a question of truth. It’s a question of choice. What do you intend?
First of all, many thanks for the lengthy and prompt reply.
I’m not sure i can follow your thoughts here.
You are using a lot of concepts that i don’t really understand.
However, i get that i’m coming down on one side of the paradox of being and denying that life is just as much a sea of ‘things’ as it is a singularity.
You do talk a lot about different things being true at different stages; would you say there are different truths or rather different degrees of illusion??
Surely if it is subject to change it cannot be ascribed the label of truth?
Yet its kind of the nutshell version. I’ve talked about most of this stuff in more detail elsewhere. You can try Key Posts or the Search tool if you want to explore something specific.
I would say that there are layers to illusion. As we wake from each layer, the illusions decrease. Each state of consciousness produces it’s own way of perceiving, its own sense of reality.
For example, the book suggests past lives may not be known until after soul waking. There would of course we exceptions and also things like psychics who tell us stuff.
Thus past lives are hooey, then they are not, then they are stories, then expressions of the divine. All of these are true in that state. This is true of pretty much everything. (laughs) So truth is relative. But there is a fundamental reality which is unchanging. But it is beyond ideas of truth or false. The very idea something is true means that something else must be false, so some duality remains.
In that sense truth itself is true and false at different stages (laughs). Yeah, its a real mind bender.
I’ll be talking about this as I get time to write the next few articles. How we learn the new “rules” or truths, only to find them fall away again.
This does get easier as the egos need to be right falls away.
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David, in one of the comments above you mentioned in passing that “We’re coming to a time when we’ll be experiencing legends come to life.” Would you care to elaborate on this?
For example, did you mean legends, as in stories such as the Mahabarata? Or legends, as in personalities, such as sages like Veda Vyasa? Or perhaps something altogether different?
For some reason that comment stirred something deep in me, so I would like to hear a bit more if you’re inclined to do so. 🙂
Hi Greg
I mean both, and more. I’ve seen some say the Mahabharata is being lived out right now in the subtle as the light rises.
But my meaning is more related to the descent of the divine. As that becomes progressively more lively in group consciousness, we’ll see increasing numbers of progressively more remarkable people.
I’ve seen amazing changes in the last decade – waves of people awakening and some moving on to very high stages. I’ve met people with amazing gifts. As these people mature into it and more join them, more manifest abilities will gradually start showing up and things more obvious to the average person.
The cosmic is already functioning in ways I would not have expected yet. But there is also still a lot of thrashing going on in the world. It will take time and hopefully growing smoothness.
It’s not so much that I expect old legends returning but new legends to arise. We live in remarkable times.
Thanks, that really helps, and is inspiring to boot.