Some people think of past lives as evidence that life is somewhat like living on the eternal and universal playground where a bully is forever grabbing their wrist and hitting them with their own hand while chanting “Why’re you hitting yourself? Why’re you hitting yourself?” Others think of past lives as an ongoing class with a punitive teacher who assigns difficult or impossible tasks, and then punishes them for not being perfect at them by submitting them to ridicule, making them suffer endlessly, making them repeat the project over and over again until they achieve the end result with perfect technique.
Both of these perspectives place people in the subordinate role of student with an authority or beings of power controlling the situation. Underlying these notions is the ideas that people are powerless, are victims, and that the system must be escaped somehow or that someone other than people need to intervene in order to rectify such negative experiences. Some people feel that with enough time in they will graduate from the incarnation process and move on to a better place. Others feel that there is some practice, some state of being or some way of life that will help them escape all together.
While I understand where these ideas come from, I find none of them validated in people’s Soul Books or in their Past Life records. What I have found recorded over and over again is the fact that no one is required to live an embodied life. It is a choice that we enter into freely each time we embody. And each life we undertake is a choice we make after a huge amount of research, self reflection and evaluation, preplanning, and preparation. The wild cards in the mix are the fact that we forget who we truly are while we are here in order to focus on this life exclusively and free will. All beings have it and everyone is free willing every second of their lives so random happens and that is part of the mystery and the amazingness of life.
Looking at people’s past lives is fascinating not only because of the variety of them, but because of the choices made prior to their start and while they are being lived. Actions and reactions, choices of careers, of circumstances, of relationships, of opportunities and what we do with those choices or whether we choose to make them at all makes each one a work of art that can be noir or stark or resplendent or sepia or just a wash of color and feeling. We aren’t completely in control of everything, because we are just one part of the interconnected web of things, but we are not entirely victims of some punitive God who delights in our suffering. Past lives can show us the choices we have made and help us understand more clearly who we are and what potential we have for this lifetime.