There is only one way for you to know yourself as Me, and that is for you first to know yourself as not Me. [...]
Upon entering the physical universe, you relinquished your remembrance of yourself. This allows you to choose to be Who You Are, rather than simply wake up in the castle, so to speak. [...]
Your job on Earth, therefore, is not to learn (because you already know), but to re-member Who You Are. And to re-member who everyone else is. That is why a big part of your job is to remind others (that is, to re-mind them), so that they can re-member also.
All the wonderful spiritual teachers have been doing just that. It is your sole purpose. That is to say, your soul purpose.
Know this: there is no such thing as an incorrect path — for on this journey you cannot “not get” where you are going.
It is simply a matter of speed — merely a question of when you will get there — yet even that is an illusion, for there is no “when,” neither is there a “before” or “after.” There is only now; an eternal moment of always in which you are experiencing yourself.
Then what is the point? If there is no way not to “get there,” what is the point of life? Why should we worry at all about anything we do?
Well, of course, you shouldn’t. But you would do well to be observant. Simply notice who and what you are being, doing, and having, and see whether it serves you.
The point of life is not to get anywhere — it is to notice that you are, and have always been, already there. You are, always and forever, in the moment of pure creation. The point of life is therefore to create — who and what you are, and then to experience that.
To conduct his research, Whitton gathered together a core group of roughly thirty people. These included individuals from all walks of life, from truck drivers to computer scientists, some of whom believed in reincarnation and some of whom did not. He then hypnotized them individually and spent literally thousands of hours recording everything they had to say about their alleged previous existences.
Even in its broad strokes the information was fascinating. One striking aspect was the degree of agreement between the subjects' experiences. All reported numerous past lives, some as many as twenty to twenty-five, although a practical limit was reached when Whitton regressed them to what he calls their "caveman existences," when one lifetime became indistinguishable from the next. All reported that gender was not specific to the soul, and many had lived at least one life as the opposite sex. And all reported that the purpose of life was to evolve and learn, and that multiple existences facilitated this process. [...]
Many of the subjects also experienced profound psychological and physical healings as a result of the traumatic past-life memories they unearthed, and gave uncannily accurate historical details about the times in which they had lived. Some even spoke languages unknown to them. While reliving an apparent past life as a Viking, one man, a thirty-seven-year-old behavioral scientist, shouted words that linguistic authorities later identified as Old Norse. After being regressed to an ancient Persian lifetime, the same man began to write in a spidery, Arabic-style script that an expert in Near Eastern languages identified as an authentic representation of Sassanid Pahlavi, a longextinct Mesopotamian tongue that flourished between A. D. 226 and 651. [...]
[Dr. Ian Stevenson, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Virginia Medical School] interviews young children who have spontaneously remembered apparent previous existences. He has spent more than thirty years in this pursuit and has collected and analyzed thousands of cases from all over the globe.
According to Stevenson, spontaneous past-life recall is relatively common among children, so common that the number of cases that seem worth considering far exceeds his staff's ability to investigate them. Generally children are between the ages of two and four when they start talking about their "other life, " and frequently they remember dozens of particulars, including their name, the names of family members and friends, where they lived, what their house looked like, what they did for a living, how they died, and even obscure information such as where they hid money before they died and, in cases involving murder, sometimes even who killed them.
Indeed, frequently their memories are so detailed Stevenson is able to track down the identity of their previous personality and verify virtually everything they have said. He has even taken children to the area in which their past incarnation lived, and watched as they navigated effortlessly through strange neighborhoods and correctly identified their former house, belongings, and past-life relatives and friends. [...]
[Stevenson] has also found instances in which distinctive facial features, foot deformities, and other characteristics have carried over from one life to the next. Most numerous among these are physical injuries carrying over as scars or birthmarks. In one case, a boy who remembered being murdered in his former life by having his throat slit still had a long reddish mark resembling a scar across his neck. In another, a boy who remembered committing suicide by shooting himself in the head in his past incarnation still had two scarlike birthmarks that lined up perfectly along the bullet's trajectory, one where the bullet had entered and one where it had exited. And in another, a boy had a birthmark resembling a surgical scar complete with a line of red marks resembling stitch wounds, in the exact location where his previous personality had had surgery.
In fact, Stevenson has gathered hundreds of such cases and is currently compiling a four-volume study of the phenomenon. In some of the cases he has even been able to obtain hospital and/or autopsy reports of the deceased personality and show that such injuries not only occurred, but were in the exact location of the present birthmark or deformity.
Is there such a thing as reincarnation? How many past lives have I had? [...]
It is difficult to believe there is still a question about this. I find it hard to imagine. There have been so many reports from thoroughly reliable sources of past life experiences. Some of these people have brought back strikingly detailed descriptions of events, and such completely verifiable data as to eliminate any possibility that they were making it up or had contrived to somehow deceive researchers and loved ones. [...]
Do you think this is your first attempt at this?
I have no idea.
It doesn’t seem as if you’ve been here before?
Sometimes.
Well, you have. Many times.
How many times?
Many times. [...]
You were everything in [those lives]. A king, a queen, a serf. A teacher, a student, a master. A male, a female. A warrior, a pacifist. A hero, a coward. A killer, a savior. A sage, a fool. You have been all of it! [...]
That’s supposed to encourage me?
It’s supposed to inspire you.
How so?
First, it takes the worry out of it. It brings in the “can’t fail” element you just talked about. It assures you that the intention is for you not to fail. That you’ll get as many chances as you want and need. You can come back again and again and again. If you do get to the next step, if you evolve to the next level, it’s because you want to, not because you have to. [...]
And so you ask a very good question. Why go on? Why even start off on such a path? What is to be gained from embarking on such a journey? Where is the incentive? What is the reason?
The reason is ridiculously simple.
THERE IS NOTHING ELSE TO DO.
What do You mean?
I mean this is the only game in town. There is nothing else to do. In fact, there is nothing else you can do. You are going to be doing what you are doing for the rest of your life — just as you have been doing it since birth. The only question is whether you’ll be doing it consciously, or unconsciously. [...]
But remember, none of it has been exactly a drudge. I mean, you’ve loved all of it! Every last minute! Oh, it’s delicious, this thing called life! It’s a scrumptious experience, no?
Well, yes, I suppose.
You suppose? How much more scrumptious could I have made it? Are you not being allowed to experience everything? The tears, the joy, the pain, the gladness, the exaltation, the massive depression, the win, the lose, the draw? What more is there?
A little less pain, perhaps.
Less pain without more wisdom defeats your purpose; does not allow you to experience infinite joy — which is What I Am.
Be patient. You are gaining wisdom. And your joys are now increasingly available without pain. That, too, is a very good sign.
Do you imagine that a human soul encounters life challenges — whatever they may be — by accident? Is this your imagining?
Do you mean a soul chooses what kind of life it will experience ahead of time?
No, that would defeat the purpose of the encounter. The purpose is to create your experience — and thus, create your Self — in the glorious moment of Now. You do not, therefore, choose the life you will experience ahead of time.
You may, however, select the persons, places, and events — the conditions and circumstances, the challenges and obstacles, the opportunities and options with which to create your experience. You may select the colors for your palette, the tools for your chest, the machinery for your shop. What you create with these is your business. That is the business of life.
But Whitton's most remarkable discovery came when he [hypnotically] regressed subjects to the interim between lives, a dazzling, light-filled realm in which there was "no such thing as time or space as we know it." According to his subjects, part of the purpose of this realm was to allow them to plan their next life, to literally sketch out the important events and circumstances that would befall them in the future. But this process was not simply some fairy-tale exercise in wish fulfillment. Whitton found that when individuals were in the between-life realm, they entered an unusual state of consciousness in which they were acutely self-aware and had a heightened moral and ethical sense. In addition, they no longer possessed the ability to rationalize away any of their faults and misdeeds, and saw themselves with total honesty. To distinguish it from our normal everyday consciousness, Whitton calls this intensely conscientious state of mind "metaconsciousness."
Thus, when subjects planned their next life, they did so with a sense of moral obligation. They would choose to be reborn with people whom they had wronged in a previous life so they would have the opportunity to make amends for their actions. They planned pleasant encounters with "soul mates," individuals with whom they had built a loving and mutually beneficial relationship over many lifetimes; and they scheduled "accidental" events to fulfill still other lessons and purposes. One man said that as he planned his next life he visualized "a sort of clockwork instrument into which you could insert certain parts in order for specific consequences to follow."
These consequences were not always pleasant. After being regressed to a metaconscious state, a woman who had been raped when she was thirty-seven revealed that she had actually planned the event before she had come into this incarnation. As she explained, it had been necessary for her to experience a tragedy at that age in order to force her to change her "entire soul complexion" and thus break through to a deeper and more positive understanding of the meaning of life.
Another subject, a man afflicted with a serious and lifethreatening kidney disease, disclosed that he had chosen the illness to punish himself for a past-life transgression. However, he also revealed that dying from the kidney disease was not part of his script, and before he had come into this life he had also arranged to encounter someone or something that would help him remember this fact and hence enable him to heal both his guilt and his body. True to his word, after he started his sessions with Whitton he experienced a nearmiraculous complete recovery.
You are using all of Life — all of many lives — to be and decide Who You Really Are; to choose and to create Who You Really Are; to experience and to fulfill your current idea about yourself.
You are in an Eternal Moment of Self creation and Self fulfillment through the process of Self expression. You have drawn the people, events, and circumstances of your life to you as tools with which to fashion the Grandest Version of the Greatest Vision you ever had about yourself. This process of creation and recreation is ongoing, never ending, and multi-layered. It is all happening “right now” and on many levels.
In your linear reality you see the experience as one of Past, Present, and Future. You imagine yourself to have one life, or perhaps many, but surely only one at a time.
But what if there were no “time”? Then you’d be having all your “lives” at once!
You are!
You are living this life, your presently realized life, in your Past, your Present, your Future, all at once! Have you ever had a “strange foreboding” about some future event — so powerful that it made you turn away from it?
In your language you call that premonition. From My viewpoint it is simply an awareness you suddenly have of something you’ve just experienced in your “future.”
Your “future you” is saying, “Hey, this was no fun. Don’t do this!”
You are also living other lives — what you call “past lives” — right now as well — although you experience them as having been in your “past” (if you experience them at all), and that is just as well. It would be very difficult for you to play this wonderful game of life if you had full awareness of what is going on.
Not all of Whitton's subjects were so eager to learn about the future their metaconscious selves had laid out for them. Several censored their own memories and asked Whitton to please give them posthypnotic instructions not to remember anything that they had said during trance. As they explained, they did not want to be tempted to tamper with the script their metaconscious selves had written for them.
This is an astounding idea. Is it possible that our unconscious mind is not only aware of the rough outline of our destiny, but actually steers us toward its fulfillment?