A Day in the Life of the Soul

Reincarnation, past life regressions and investigations into karma-generating events are still very popular in spiritual circles.  Are they necessary?  Let’s think about it.  We could argue that one human lifetime is rather like a day in the life of the soul, with dawn being the human birth and evening being the human death.  This is far from being a new analogy (and has inspired poetry of variable quality over the years). 

The argument continues that, just as our past influences the present, so our past lives influence our present lives; and this becomes a justification for focusing on this very intriguing and seductive makyo, or red herring.

But we forget that the universe is also, in a very real sense, holographic.  This is certainly true of our lives; we come into the world with a temperament which is largely the accumulation of what has gone before, and that temperament will ensure that we face what we need to face in this life, regardless of whether we know the details of events in past lives or not.  Our lives are obedient to the great principle: as above, so below.

The childhood we experienced in this lifetime has given us all the material we need for progress in this life. This is, as Thorvald Detlefsen puts it in his book of the same name, the challenge of fate.  And so if we have issues with a controlling male from a past life, then a controlling father or authority figure will highlight the same issues in this life.  If we have gone through some experience which scarred us, we may find health problems reflecting these.  Witches may have phobias about fire, or burns, or neck problems from being hanged, for example.

The point is that the material comes into the world with us, shaping early and perhaps later life, so we can burn off the karma.  There is no need to go looking for dramatic explanations in past lives; deal with the issue mindfully as it presents itself today, in this life.  In a very real sense, it doesn’t matter whether we reincarnate or not.

The universe isn’t some sort of cosmic adding machine totting up brownie points and demerits either.  Life, and the consequences of our actions, shape us over time, perhaps separating us from aspects of our selves, perhaps developing us in unexpected directions.  When we die, I think the best way to describe the ‘soul’ is simply to say that the stream of our consciousness gets dumped back into the cosmic soup pot; but if the experiences we’ve had have shaped us enough, we may retain some of our shape, enough to have the same shape picked up by the ladle and dumped into a new life.  Adding karma shapes us, letting go unshapes us so eventually we can go back into the pot and merge with it, become one with the void.  

That means that our fates, destinies, souls, whatever you want to call them, are in fact the same as our karma and things to be let go of.  The path toward enlightenment is one of reducing the self and embracing the impersonal, the soup in which we are all the same.  The more focused we are on our fate, our “lessons”, our astrology charts, the more focused we are on our wonderful special selves as individuals, the less likely we are to be on track.  It’s a makyo.

But it’s also a normal phase; in Gnostic terminology it’s Psychic and later on Pneumatic.  And those same runes, charts, regressions and divination tools that can distract us from our practice can also be used to help us identify the things we need to face, and move on from.

So the question is not whether regressions, divinations etc are right or wrong.  The question is whether we need them to help us confront something, or whether we are allowing them to distract us from any serious self-enquiry.