Journey of Souls (36 page)

Dr. N: Ah, so you might do something other than what was planned in the spirit world?

S: Yeah, and it may not work out as well … but we have the right to miss the red flags.

Dr. N: Well, I have enjoyed our talk about the place of recognition and I wondered if there is anything else this spiritual class does for you later in physical life.

S: (in a far away voice) Yes, sometimes when I am confused abut my life and don’t know where to turn next, I just … imagine where I might be going compared to where I’ve been and … it comes to me what to do.

Helping clients recognize people who were destined to have an impact on their lives is a fascinating aspect of my practice. I believe those who come to see me about relationships are not in my office at a certain point in their lives by chance. Am I spoiling the purpose of their spiritual recognition class by assisting these subjects in recalling clues? I don’t think so, for two basic reasons. What they are not supposed to know yet probably won’t be revealed in hypnosis, while on the other hand, quite a few of my clients only want confirmation of what they already suspect is true.

I can speak about recognition signs from personal experience, since I was blessed by three specific clues to help me find my wife. Thumbing through Look magazine as a teenager, I once saw a Christmas advertisement for Hamilton watches modeled by a beautiful dark-haired woman dressed in white. The caption in the ad said, “To Peggy,” because she was holding a wristwatch as a gift from an imaginary husband. An odd sensation came over me, and I never forgot the name or face. On my twenty-first birthday I received a watch of the same make from a favorite aunt.

A few years later, while attending a graduate school in Phoenix, I was washing a load of white laundry one Saturday. Suddenly, the first trigger was activated in my mind with the message, “It’s time to meet the woman in white.” I tried to shake it off, but the face in the ad pushed all other thoughts away. I stopped, looked at my Hamilton watch and heard the command, “Go now.” I thought about who wears white. Acting as if I was obsessed, I went to the largest hospital in the city and asked at the desk for a nurse matching the name and description.

I was told there was such a person who was coming off her shift. When I saw her, I was stunned by the resemblance to the picture in my mind. Our meeting was awkward and embarrassing, but later we sat in the lobby and talked non-stop for four hours as old friends who hadn’t seen each other for a while-which, of course, was true. I waited until after we were married to tell my wife about the reason I came to her hospital and the clues given to me to find her. I didn’t want her to think I was crazy. It was then I learned that on the day of our first meeting she had told her astonished friends, “I just met the man I’m going to marry.

My advice to people about meaningful encounters is not to intellectualize coming events too much. Some of our best decisions come from what we call instinct. Go with your gut feelings at the time. When a special moment is meant to happen in life, it usually does.

One of the last requirements before embarkation for many souls is to go before the Council of Elders for the second time. While some of my subjects see the Council only once between lives, most see them right after death and just before rebirth. The spirit world is an environment personified by order and the Elders want to reinforce the significance of a soul’s goals for the next life. Sometimes my clients tell me they return to their spirit group after this meeting to say goodbye while others say they leave immediately for reincarnation. The latter procedure was used by a subject who described this exit meeting in the following manner.

“My guide, Marge, escorts me to a soft, white space which is like being in a cloud-filled enclosure. I see my committee of three waiting for me as usual. The middle Elder seems to have the most commanding energy. They all have oval faces, high cheekbones, no hair and smallish features. They seem to me to be sexless-or rather they appear to blend from male to female and back. I feel calm. The atmosphere is formal but not unfriendly. Each in turn asks me questions in a gentle way. The Elders are all-knowing about my entire span of lives but they are not as directive as one might think. They want my input to assess my motivations and the strength of my resolve towards working in new body. I am sure they have had a hand in the body choices I was given for the life to come because I feel they are skilled strategists in life selection. The committee wants me to honor my contract. They stress the benefits of persistence and holding to my values under adversity. I often give in too easily to anger and they remind me of this while reviewing my past actions and reactions towards events and people. The Elders and Magra give me inspiration, hope and encouragement to trust my-self more in bad situations and not let things get out of hand. And then, as a final act to bolster my confidence when I am about to leave, they raise their arms and send a power bolt of positive energy into my mind to take with me.”

One aspect of the two council meetings which I initially found rather odd is that members of the same soul group do not necessarily go before the same panel. For a while I assumed there would always be a correlation here because ail members of a single soul group have the same guide. I was wrong. In the minds of my subjects, even senior guides are thought to be a couple of steps below the developmental level of the omnipotent beings who make up their councils. They are similar to the Old Ones that Thece told us about in Chapter 11, but with more specific responsibilities toward life evaluation of souls. While a guide might, in some respects, be considered a personal confidant to a soul this same familiarity does not extend to an Elder. In time, I came to appreciate that an Elder’s authority, unlike that of guides, involves a cross-section of souls from many groups.

Apparently, everyone in a soul group respects the intensely private nature of these proceedings. They all see their individual Council of Elders as godly. The Elders are bathed in bright light and the whole setting has an aura of divinity. A subject put it this way, “when we are taken into the presence of these superior beings who exist in such a high spiritual realm, it validates our feelings about the source of creation.”

WE have seen how a soul’s decision to come forward into the next life at a specific time and place on Earth involves an ordered progression of spiritual planning. As I bring the soul consciousness of my subjects nearer to the moment of their exit from the spirit world, most become quietly introspective, while others engage in light bantering with their friends. These reactions toward what lies ahead depend more upon the individual soul than on the length of time since a last incarnation.

Rebirth is a profound experience. Those souls getting ready for embarkation to Earth are like battle-hardened veterans girding themselves for combat. This is the last chance for souls to enjoy the omniscience of knowing just who they are before they must adapt to a new body. My last case involves the soul of a woman who offers us a well-defined description of her most recent passage to Earth.

Case 29

Dr. N: Has the time arrived for you to be reborn into your next life?

S: Yes, it has.

Dr. N: What is uppermost in your mind about returning to Earth?

S: The opportunity to live in the twentieth century. It’s an exciting time of many changes.

Dr. N: And have you seen this life, or at least parts of it, in advance?

S: Yes … I’ve been through that … (subject seems distracted)

Dr. N: Is there something else you want to talk to me about concerning your next incarnation?

S: I am having a last talk with Pomar (subject’s guide) on all the alternatives to my project (life).

Dr. N: Might this be considered a final exit interview with Pomar?

S: Yes, I suppose it would.

Dr. N: Would it help you to talk to me about the contingency plans you have for the next life?

S: (voice is dry and rather thin) I … think I have them straight …

Dr. N: How did your recognition class go? I assume that phase of your preparation is complete?

S: (still distracted) Uh-huh … I’ve met with the rest (of the participants) for my project.

Dr. N: Are the recognition signs clear in your mind for meeting the right souls at the right time?

S: (nervous laugh) Ah … the signals … my compacts with people … yes, that’s all done.

Dr. N: Without analyzing or censoring your impressions in any way, tell me what you are feeling at this moment.

S: I’m … just… gathering myself for… the big jump into a new life … there is apprehension … but I am excited, too

Dr. N: Are you a little scared and perhaps wondering if you should go to Earth at all?

S: (pause and then more cheerfully) A little … concern … for what lies ahead of me … leaving my home here … but happy, too, at the opportunity.

Dr. N: So you have mixed emotions about leaving the spirit world?

S: Most of us do, as our time draws near. I have second thoughts before some lives … but Pomar knows when I am lagging behind my schedule-you can’t hide anything here, you know.

Dr. N: Okay, let’s assume it’s a go situation for your next life. On the count of three, your decision to return at an appointed time is firm and you are in the final stage to leave the spirit world. One, two, three! Describe to me what happens to you now.

S: I say goodbye to everyone. This can be… difficult. (tosses her head back with resolution) Anyway, they all wish me well and I move away from them … drifting alone. There is no great rush Pomar allows me to collect my thoughts. When I am quite ready he comes to escort me … to offer encouragement … reassurance … and he knows when I am prepared to go.

Dr. N: I sense that you are now more upbeat about the prospect of rebirth.

S: Yes, it’s a period of inspiration and expectations… a new body … the course ahead

I now prepare this subject to leave the spirit world for the last time before her current life. I am as careful here as when I brought her into the spirit world for the first time following normal age-regression. Starting with a reinforcement of the protective energy shield already placed around this subject, I apply additional conditioning techniques to keep her soul in proper balance with the mind of the child she is joining on Earth.

Dr. N: All right, you and Pomar are together for your exit from the spirit world. I want you to go deep inside yourself and explain to me what you do next as if it were happening in slow motion. Go!

S: (pause) We … begin to move… at a greater speed. Then I am aware of Pomar… detaching from me … and I am alone.

Dr. N: What do you see and feel?

S: Oh, I…

Dr. N: Stay with it! You are alone and moving faster. Then what?

S: (in a faint voice) … Away … slanting away … through pillows of whiteness … moving away …

Dr. N: Stay with it! Keep going and report back to me.

S: Oh, I’m … passing through… folds of silky cloth… smooth I’m on a band … a pathway … faster and faster

Dr. N: Keep going! Don’t stop talking to me.

S: Everything is blurred… I’m sliding down… down into a long, dark tube … a hollow feeling … darkness … then … warmth!

Dr. N: Where are you now?

S: (pause) I’m aware of being inside my mother.

Dr. N: Who are you?

S: (chuckles) I’m in a baby-I’m a baby.

The hollow tube effect described by my cases is apparently not the mother’s birth canal. It is similar to the tunnel souls pass through at physical death and may be the same route. The reader might wonder why I would take more care with the act of birthing when I have already brought my subjects in and out of a number of past lives during a session. There are two reasons. First, reliving a past life does not need to involve the birthing process. I help my clients go straight from the spirit world into the next life, usually as adults. Second, if I return subjects to their current body and decide to command them to relive the birthing experience, I want to remove any minor discomforts felt by some people after they wake up.

Before continuing with this case, I should offer a little more general information about souls and babies. All my subjects tell me the transition of their souls from the spirit world to the mind of a baby is relatively more rapid than the passage back. What is the reason for this difference? After physical death our souls travel through the time tunnel and move past a gateway into the spirit world in a progressive way. We have seen how the outward passage is intended to be more gradual than our return to Earth in order to allow for acclimatization of a newly freed soul. However, as souls who enter babies, we come from a state of all-knowing and thus are mentally able to adjust more quickly to our surroundings than at the end of a physical life. Then too, we are given additional time for adaptation while in our mother’s womb.

Nevertheless, having this time inside our mother does not mean we are fully prepared for the jarring paroxysm of birth, with blinding hospital lights, having to suddenly breathe air, and being physically handled for the first time. My subjects say if they were to compare the moment of birth with that of death, the physical shock of being born is much greater.

At some point prior to birth, the soul will carefully touch and join more fully with the impressionable, developing brain of a baby. When a soul decides to enter a baby, apparently that child has no free choice in accepting or rejecting the soul. At the moment of first entry, chronological time begins for the soul. Depending upon the inclinations of the particular soul involved, the connection may be early or late in the mother’s pregnancy. I have had cases where souls timed their arrival at the last minute during delivery, but this is unusual. My findings indicate even those souls who join the baby early seem to do a lot of traveling outside the mother’s womb during her term.

Once birth has taken place, the union of spirit and flesh has been fully solidified into a partnership. The immortal soul then becomes the seat of perception for the developing human ego. The soul brings a spiritual force which is the heritage of infinite consciousness. Although I have said souls can be confined by a human in trauma, they are never trapped. Besides leaving at the moment of death, souls may also come and go when the body is sleeping, in deep meditation, or under an anesthetic in surgery. The soul’s absences are much longer in cases of severe brain damage and coma.