Posts Tagged ‘reincarnation’

In this column, Ask Kala -  Kala invites you to email your probing metaphysical, spiritual, holistic, esoteric and paranormal questions. Due to the volume of email she receives, she won’t be able to answer back individual e-mails. Instead, she’ll choose interesting questions and answer them here.  Here’s the latest question…

Hi Kala, My name is Tammy. I’m from Kansas City, MO. I have been wondering if when a loved one has passed and reincarnated, can you still make contact with them as the person you knew them as? Hope that makes sense! I’ve listened to many mediums – John Edwards, Lisa Williams, Mary Occhino… But I’ve never heard anyone speak to my question. Thank you!

Hi Tammy,

This is a great question. First, we must look at the soul. The soul is a container which holds our expansive energy and all that we are. We often think of our soul as being inside of our body, while actually, the soul is much larger than this and only a tiny part of the soul resides inside the body. The best way to picture this, is to visualize a pyramid, but imagine the pyramid pointing upside down. If you could see this pyramid, the giant base of the pyramid would be up in the higher spiritual planes, where souls go when they leave the earth plane. The tiny capstone of the pyramid is the section that resides within your body, in the heart. The capstone contains the spark of life, the energy which activates the soul and begins to pour all that is you, from the higher planes, down into your heart when you are born.

As you can imagine, this is a lot of energy and information, so the process slows as the size of the pyramid shape grows more narrow, until it reaches the tip inside of you. This capstone has a crystalline structure and captures all of the experiences in your life and returns this energy information back up to the higher planes and stores them in the akashic records. This is where the quote from one of my favorite authors, James Allen, comes from, where he says – “As A Man Thinketh in His Heart, So Shall He Be”.

Ok, so now we have an understanding of our soul as a container, which holds the essence of all of who we are and all we have ever been.

Now let’s look at the higher planes surrounding us. We are on the earth plane, where we are grounded through the lower chakras. We tend to think of the higher planes as places above us, way up in the sky, where people point to when they are speaking of Heaven. There are many levels to the higher planes, but let’s stick to the basics for this question. Some of the higher planes can be reached from various points of your body, including your heart, throat and third eye region, so the higher planes are closer and more accessible than most people realize. In the higher planes, the confining rules of the earth plane do not exist, including the limitations of time as we know it as well as the concept of being in one space at one time. The higher up one goes into the spiritual planes, the greater the ability is to be omni-present. This allows us basically, to be in several places at once.

As we take this big picture look at the soul, we see that the majority of the essence and energy of what makes us who we are, resides in the higher planes and that a small portion of our soul, trickles down into the body, which reincarnates from lifetime to lifetime. The larger part of ourselves, up in the higher planes has a greater consciousness and awareness and is the sum of all of our parts, all of our lifetimes and experiences.

When we reach out to speak to a loved one, who has passed on, we connect with this part of their essence, what we would refer to as the Higher Self. The Higher Self retains memory of all lifetimes including the one that we are reaching out to connect to them. The Higher Self, not bound by the restrictions of time and space on the earth plane, can continue to communicate with us with these memories and connections of one lifetime, while also having the freedom to incorporate another portion of the self, into a new body to gain new experiences at the same time.

An example of this situation was portrayed in the movie, What Dreams May Come, as the character played by Robin Williams travels to the other planes and meets his children, but finds that being his child was just one tiny portion of who they are.

The journey and experience of each us on the soul level, is the topic of my book, 9 Life Altering Lessons: Secrets of the Mystery Schools Unveiled, where I state: ‘We are Greater Than We Remember Ourselves To Be’.

Tammy, I hope this answers your question. Thanks for writing in to the Ask Kala column. Wishing you the best in all things!

As Bob Marley once said, “Man is a universe within himself”.

Join me and take a walk on the wild side,
Kala

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Since the seventies, past life regression has been widely practiced and many books – some  impressive and well-documented – have been published on this subject.  It is therefore  surprising that dreams were not examined for past life residues as well.  After all,  it stands to reason that if past life memories can be accessed under hypnosis and in altered states of consciousness, they have to be present also in our dreams. Several  factors must have contributed to sustaining this blind spot in our field of vision. Dream researchers must have avoided the subject out of fear of professional ridicule. Jungians must have felt threatened by the idea that past life selves might be entitled  to some of the space in the unconscious that had previously been occupied by the archetypes . And for the average dream worker  it would have been perfectly normal to stay within the “neuro-net” of traditional  methods of interpreting dreams.

What shook me out of my “neuro-net” twenty-nine years ago was  a dream that was “different”. Before I had this dream,  I had never given reincarnation any thought.  But during five years of a Jungian analysis in London, I had come to know my dream-world  like the back of my hand.  And this particular dream  was not part of the dream-world I knew.  It seemed to belong to another  identity,  another country, and another time. Moreover,  it was completely devoid of symbolism, which  – as we know – is the alpha and omega  of the dream language.

In this dream,  I am a man; I am standing with my back against a barn-door in a medieval  European town  while an angry mob is pelting me with stones. I am terrified and in pain. To get away from my tormentors,  I say I have to urinate. They let me step inside the barn so that I can relieve myself in private.  I am still aware of taking my penis out of my pants. Then there is a blank. Next  I am being driven on an ox-cart through town,  surrounded by jeering crowds. A red-robed priest is taking me to the court of the Inquisition. I have collapsed on the waggon-floor, sobbing uncontrollably, while deeply ashamed of my lack of composure. For until the public mood had changed,  I had been a celebrity in this town.  While in this man’s body, I had been aware of his distinct personality, his sensitivity, and the complexity of his feelings. This disqualified him as an archetype, which, according to Jungian theory,  is a “type”, rather than a person. From that moment on I became convinced of the existence of reincarnation and was on the look-out for more past life dreams.

At the Jung Institute in Zurich where I started to train a year later,  I met two analysts who had dared to venture into this borderland of the psyche,  knowing full well that it was politically the wrong thing to do.  One, a Dutchman,  Erlo van Waveren,  had been a personal analysand of Jung who,  in the fifties,  had worked  with him on his past life dreams under the seal of secrecy.  In 1978 – seventeen years after his analyst’s death – van Waveren had finally plucked up his courage and published a book about his experiences entitled Journey to the Rebirth. The second rebel was Dr. Elisabeth Ruef, a highly respected senior training analyst at the Zurich Institute and the co-editor of Jung’s Collected Works. She gave a  public lecture series on past life dreams in the wake of van Waveren’s book publication. But while van Waveren – as a patron of the Jung Institute – got away with the heresy,  Elisabeth Ruef was later crucified for it by her colleagues. This taught me that it was not safe to discuss my past life dreams in analysis, and my process went underground. It was kept alive by its own dynamics, by information obtained from an exceptionally gifted past life reader, and by whatever  strange energies I osmotically absorbed while translating Jane Roberts’ book Seth Speaks into German. When this unconventional  part of my training was over, most of my important past lives were integrated;  in addition, I had learned to identify past life dreams and was ready to work with them therapeutically.  After my graduation from the Jung Institute in 1987 I went into private practice in Santa Fe without  ever  advertizing myself as a past life therapist. But those who needed to integrate their past lives through dreams found me anyway.  These people were drawn to this work not by curiosity – as is sometimes the case with those seeking past life regressions – but by an urgent inner necessity. Their process, which was  initiated and timed solely by their own unconscious, was  often painful and lengthy,  but almost always life-changing.
Five years ago, so much extraordinary past life material had accumulated in my files that I felt obligated to leave a record of it. Thus I embarked  on the daunting task of writing a book about it. Many things became clear to me only while I was organizing the dream material.  I discovered the “bloodlines of the soul” – the character traits and individual life themes that run like red threads through our incarnations.  I also observed the relentlessness with which we reap what we have sowed in previous incarnations. This moved  karmic responsibility into the foreground of my awareness.  The book never let me go,  even  in my sleep.  Information filtered down  in my  dreams like the “dew of heaven” of the Kaballah. And when during the day I turned on the television,  I noticed that  “other lives” were creeping into the vernacular. This made me wonder if the archetype of reincarnation, which I was trying to capture in my writing, was beginning to stir in the collective unconscious, too. Still, I had been working in such isolation, that  I had no idea how my book  would be received  when it was finally published in April. A Jungian colleague had predicted that it would be ignored by other analysts. This had taken the wind out of my sails. Consequently, when I made a submission to this year’s IASD conference in Berkeley,  I expected it to be rejected by the dream researchers as well. And when it was accepted,  I still thought that nobody would show up for my presentation.  I was stunned when more and more people filed into the room to hear what I had to say about past life dreams. I was grateful, moved , and a bit overwhelmed  by the enthusiasm with the new information was received. However,  what really got my attention was an e-mail I received two weeks after the conference. It came from a stranger in Istanbul who identified  herself as an IASD member who had not been able to attend the conference. She said she was the leader of an internet dream group of 160 Turkish speaking members,  and lately past life dreams had been very much on their minds. She might even  have  had such dreams herself. Would I please send her a copy of my presentation?  She would read it very carefully.

Then I finally realized that I had been all along part of an international network of dreamers  who were becoming conscious of the past life phenomenon at the same time. What this growing awareness might mean and what effect it might have on human attitudes is difficult to assess at this early point.  It might be a sign that the Aquarian Age is finally dawning on us with a trail of new ideas and greater awareness.  It might also help the peace movement  in our troubled,  hate-and- fear driven world. For who would want to make war on the enemy “out there” knowing that you become what you hate and despise  in one of your next incarnations? And who can afford to look down on members of another race, creed and gender when the evidence for having been all those things ourselves can be found in our own dreams? This throws a new light on Bill Stimson’s inspired statement who founded the Dream Network  over twenty years ago: “To work with dreams in the deepest sense is to be a leader in the revolution of human consciousness.”  (Published in DreamNetwork, Vol. 24 No. 3, Fall 2005 & http://DreamNetwork.net)

Kala speaks with Sabine Lucas about her book Past Life Dreamwork: Healing the Soul through Understanding Karmic Patterns on The Explore Your Spirit with Kala Show. Interview coming in August 2009

More about Sabine Lucas….

Sabine Lucas was born and raised in Germany and educated exclusively in European countries. She holds a Ph.D. in German and English literature from Heidelberg University and a Diploma in Analytical Psychology from the C.G. Jung Institute in Zurich. While living in England, she taught German language and literature at Reading University and worked for BBC London as a language consultant. Later, as a student in Switzerland, she supported herself by translating Jane Roberts’ books Seth Speaks and The Nature of Personal Reality and Jung’s English correspondence and lectures for the German Collected Works edition into German. Dr. Lucas pioneered dream groups and dream workshops in Switzerland and Austria in the seventies—a time when they were still a novelty. After moving to California in 1983, she worked part-time at the Mental Health Clinic in Mariposa, California, while training future mental health professionals at the California School for Professional Psychology in Fresno in dream analysis.

Since 1987, Sabine has been in private practice in Santa Fe, where she is licensed as a Professional Mental Health Counselor. Although her interest in past life dreams and the concomitant self-exploration goes back to 1976, it has been part of her clinical practice only for the last fifteen years. In the course of this time, she has been able to develop her own unique method of working with past life dreams and of integrating past life material in such a way that it enriches and empowers, while keeping the person balanced and grounded.Dr. Lucas is a member of the International Association for Analytical Psychology, of the Association of Graduate Analytical Psychologists of the C.G. Jung Institute, Zurich, and a diplomate of the American Psychotherapy Association. More info at: www.pastlifedreams.com

On The Explore Your Spirit with Kala Show, I’ve had the opportunity to interview Dr. Walter Semkiw to discuss his research on reincarnation. The author of Return of the Revolutionaries: The Case for Reincarnation and Soul Groups Reunited, his work has been featured on CNN and cited in Newsweek. Semkiw founded the Institute for the Integration of Science, Intuition, and Spirit (IISIS), dedicated to researching reincarnation and related phenomena scientifically and promoting the social transformation that objective evidence of reincarnation will bring.  His research discusses reincarnation and past life cases are reviewed which demonstrate that from lifetime to lifetime, facial features, personality traits, passions, aptitudes and linguistic writing style remain consistent. People are also shown to incarnate in karmic soul groups and many times married couples come back together, which explains the phenomenon of “love at first sight.”

To listen to this interview on Explore Your Spirit, click here: http://exploreyourspirit.com/Media/shows1.shtml#SEMKIW

For those of you on the East Coast, Dr. Semkiw will be speaking at Edgar Cayce’s A.R.E. (in Virginia Beach, VA) Annual Easter Conference, Reincarnation, Resurrection, and Renewal from April 10-12, which celebrates the eternal nature of the soul with ground-breaking research into proof of reincarnation.  Admission fee is $245, with special discounts for A.R.E. members, seniors, and full-time students.

For more information:  contact the A.R.E. at www.EdgarCayce.org/conferences