Capítulo 1. COMENZANDO EL VIAJE

 

CHAPTER 1

BEGINNING THE JOURNEY

Imagine waking up in a strange bed. You can’t remember what happened the night before. Your arm is numb, too heavy to lift. Gradually, you become aware of the people around you. You sense that they’re trying to help, but when you open your mouth to speak, your tongue feels thick, and you can’t find the words you need. Your vision blurs, and you begin to lapse in and out of consciousness. Perhaps it would be easier to just fall back to sleep.

Amnesia is terrifying. It doesn’t matter why you’re in the hospital—a medical incident or physical trauma. Gradually, you’ll begin to knit the pieces of your life back together. But there may be some memories that are lost forever.

You’ve experienced this before. Do you remember when you first became aware of yourself as a small child? Our earliest memories are often elusive. Perhaps you felt confused, wondering if you really belonged here. Perhaps you asked your caretakers, “Who am I?” or “Where did I come from?” Over time, their answers sank in. They gave you a name; they told you where you were born. But wisps of suspicion remained. They couldn’t answer all your questions. What were they avoiding? Where did you really come from? And is there something you have lost forever?

As an infant, you may not have realized that you are a soul incarnating in a human body. You might still doubt this. But in all probability, you have been on earth in a physical body before.

Even though some souls feel excited and curious when coming back to earth, others can find it unsettling. For a baby, unable to fend for itself, the world can be utterly bewildering. There are peculiar beings who make weird noises and unfamiliar places filled with strange comings and goings. Newly incarnated souls have largely forgotten who they are and don’t know what they might encounter this time around.

If this is challenging for souls returning after many lifetimes on earth, imagine the experience of those souls who have never incarnated here before. They find themselves encased in physical bodies that limit their movement. They are surrounded by a cacophony of intrusive sounds. Strange entities flit in and out of their vision, and every contact seems charged with intense emotions. Everything is new and potentially threatening. One can assume they find their early incarnations both confusing and confronting.

Although you have taken this journey yourself, you have probably forgotten what it was like.

Before we begin exploring the soul’s journey through many lifetimes, we need answers to some pertinent questions. What is a soul? What do we mean by nonphysical? Who were we before we came to earth? Where did we come from? Why did we decide to come here? Were we prepared for this journey, and how did we begin? What was it like when we arrived here, and how did we cope?

Feeling breathless? Good—let’s plunge right in!

Nature of Souls

What is a soul? Pretty much whatever you want it to be—and there’s the problem. Many people imagine souls to be light and free-spirited. Above all, they believe souls to be essentially virtuous. But as I have discovered, souls can become lost over the course of many lifetimes. They may return to earth time and time again, creating havoc and wreaking destruction.

If you want to understand what it really means to be a soul, look around at the people you know. Each one is a soul inhabiting a human body. And all the varied qualities you see in others—whether wholesome, devilish, or indifferent—reflect the state of their souls.

Before their first incarnation, souls are neither good nor bad. They are simply possibilities—aspects of Source that have chosen to experience life on our planet. Because souls are nonphysical, incarnation presents a challenge. They need to step down in vibration until they resonate with the earth system. Before they meld with a human body, they have already begun to change. They have opened themselves up to living in a system with many choices—all with consequences.

We refer to souls as nonphysical because we cannot perceive them with our physical senses. Humans have limitations that souls do not. When a soul incarnates as a human, it takes on these limitations. For example, the human eye can only see 0.0035 percent of the electromagnetic spectrum. We know our hearing range is limited—dogs and bats can hear frequencies we cannot. There are chemicals and gases that we cannot taste and smell. Our feelings and emotions are like an unexplored continent that we don’t know how to navigate.

It is possible that souls and the nonphysical world exist at a subtle level of physicality that is too ethereal for us to detect. Data collected over years of research suggests that the universe is largely composed of dark energy (68 percent) and dark matter (27 percent).3 Physics tells us that without dark matter the universe would fly apart, while dark energy drives its accelerating expansion. The visible cosmos only accounts for 5 percent of the universe. But scientists cannot see, touch, or identify either dark matter or dark energy. So far, no instruments have been able to detect them.

Accessing the Nonphysical Universe

When people enter a hypnotic trance during regressions, they can access elements of this invisible cosmos. They visit the afterlife and other realms. They interact with friends, relatives, and celestial beings. Being in trance allows them to bypass the five senses and access their sixth sense, or third eye. I call it an intuitive sense.

The invisible cosmos includes a dimension close to the earth, which is the place the soul calls home. Michael Newton called it our “life between lives.”4 This is a little misleading because Newton eventually discovered that the soul remains in this dimension even while incarnated. Let’s pause for a moment and take that in. What actually inhabits and animates our physical body is only an investment of energy from our larger soul. While we are living here on earth, another aspect of our greater self remains in another dimension.

This means there is a powerful relationship between the nonphysical realm and the physical earth. In combination, these form the earth system. A soul incarnating on earth has come from the nonphysical realms of the earth system, also known as the afterlife, the soul’s home, or our life between lives.

Duality

To our senses, the physical world seems dense and solid. While it is often beautiful, it is also potentially dangerous. To survive, we must remain aware of the world around us. Because we rely so much on others, we need to know if they will help us or harm us. Are they sick or healthy, happy or miserable, kind or mean? Because our bodies are vulnerable, we need to check the weather before we step outside. Will it be hot or cold, calm or windy, wet or sunny? When we cross the street, we know to watch for cars—are they moving or stationary? If they’re moving, are they travelling fast or slow, forward or backward? There is so much to notice, and it demands our full attention.

We come to realize that our world is full of opposites. Up and down, hard and soft. The most important distinction we draw is between ourselves and everything else, between I and not I. We experience reality as a set of relationships between ourselves and the rest of the world, and as another highly complex set of relationships between all the different elements we perceive in the external world: people, nature, events, and things. Each element exists relative to every other element. This is where the concept of contrast or duality comes in. It implies our separation as individuals as well as our interdependence with the rest of the world.

The whole is the combination of all these contrasts—me and you, dark and light, hot and cold. But our consciousness cannot easily hold everything together and only focus on one thing at a time. You can see the two faces, or you can see the vase. As much as you try to see them both together, all you can do is quickly flick your focus from one impression to the other.

Of course, we need to perceive all the elements of this image before we can visualize the vase or the two faces. We are whole even though our consciousness is playing a game of separation. For a few moments, some clients transcend this game.

Juana found herself in a state of oneness after reliving a challenging past life.

There is just so much love. If we could just live in that love. They [spirit beings] are always around. I am feeling the love and it is not just them. There is a greater love, and they are part of that. It is like a big space of nothing and everything. After that initial overwhelming high of love, this feels like space, evenness, nothingness, empty and full at the same time, like good and bad, whole and separate.

I ask if that means there is no duality.

Yes. That’s right. It is everything—all that is. You cannot stay here forever. There is nothing attached to it—no space, no pattern, no emotion. And yet I sense a lot of humor in this space and in the duality. The whole concept is funny, almost like it is a cosmic joke.

The whole, as well as our sense of separation, are opposites. Perhaps that is the joke. We are whole, but to play and to experience life, we need to be separate. There are two lessons to be drawn from Juana’s experience. First, she retains her identity while being immersed in those feelings of love. She is whole and separate at the same time. However, because Juana was immersed in that sense of connection, she was not fully aware of her individual identity. It’s just lingering in the background. Secondly, this experience came after she had relived a traumatic past life. Perhaps her ecstatic sense of wholeness was the culmination of all the challenges she had endured.

Other clients who have glimpsed the celestial struggled to describe the experience. They used words such as oneness, expansion, peace, connection, completeness, and timelessness. Boundaries disappeared and, for a moment, the “I” disappeared. I had thought this was probably as close as we could get to understanding wholeness until one client, Ámbar, had an unusual experience.

In her regression, Ámbar became an eagle, flying over a valley of volcanos and lava that had destroyed her nest and fledglings. Pierced by a deep sense of loss, she felt that her life lacked all purpose—until she saw the valley open to the sea and she came into a bright white light.

I feel my third eye is opening up. I have been guided to the white light, and I feel peace. I am able to see the sum of all parts and more than the dualistic nature of things.

I am seeing through the two eyes of the bird on each side of my head, which is both sides of everything and the sum of all parts as well. Each eye moves independently on each side of my head, and I see the whole with my third eye. The bright light is a place where it can all exist together rather than feeling torn about the details. That is really expansive. At the base of everything, there is no separation, and that is an expanded feeling. It is very reassuring.

Ámbar later described this experience as life changing. While Juana felt consumed by love, Ámbar remained aware of the movement

of the eagle’s individual eyes as well as its intuitive ability to see all. She was simultaneously aware of her duality and the wholeness.

This is the paradox of spirituality. If our consciousness were to be fully absorbed in the oneness, we would lose any concept of our separate identity. But as soon as we develop a concept of self, we experience everything else as separate. By definition, any awareness of our personal existence seems to require the experience, or perhaps the illusion, of separation from the whole.

We may imagine souls as being spiritual and ethereal in composition. Nevertheless, they, like humans, are playing this separation game too, as one client explained.

A soul is a point of consciousness, a point of understanding, independent, with a separate consciousness. It has its own thoughts, is able to communicate with others, and does.

One of my clients, Jazmín, was worried about returning to her life between lives. Who would she be, she wondered, once she entered the nonphysical realm?

Recently, I feared that being on the other side was all lovely and light. They are reassuring me that my wicked sense of humor has a place, and personality and individuality still exist there. There is dark and there is light, and both are accepted.

Another client, Eduardo, wanted to know what it was like being in spirit and if there were contrasts as there are on earth. He was told that, “When we are all one, there is no fun.” Eduardo understood this to mean that separation exists in the life between lives and beyond. Without contrast, existence is boring. Souls make decisions without knowing how their choice will turn out. Risk does not disappear when we return to our life between lives after death. Contrast and some level of risk remain, even after we re-emerge with our higher self.

Why Incarnate on Planet Earth?

Our universe offers an experience of separation that makes life interesting. But there is something different about incarnating on earth. The experience of separation and contrast is so extreme, we forget who we are. Earth has a heavier vibration than other places.5 Indeed, most humans remain unaware of the nonphysical dimensions. In any case, while in trance, many of my clients marvel at the unusual nature of our planet—its solidity and the deeper contrasts that exist here as opposed to other places or dimensions.

All my clients are experienced souls. They may have come to earth as young souls thousands of years ago, experiencing many incarnations since they first arrived. Others came here after incarnating on other planets or in other dimensions. For both groups, their early incarnations on earth can come as a shock. While souls choose to come to earth, none of them know what they’ll discover until they actually live here.

Rosalía elucidates her larger soul’s reasons for coming to earth to incarnate.

There is something very distracting about the solidity of the earth environment. It makes it harder to remember the game. The energy is so dense and solid. I knew about the amnesia, but I didn’t really understand. It was a nonphysical knowing, and that is not the same. Earth has been a bit of a shock.

Another client, Pepy, explains how she and two close soulmates came into the earth system to incarnate.

We have stepped down in frequency to be souls in the earth plane, and then we have stepped down in frequency again to be physical.

Pepy and her soulmates have accepted having limitations at the soul level, and then have accepted even greater limitations as humans.

Valencia had experience in other places. She describes her attraction to earth.

Earth has a level of energy that you don’t get on other planets. You can go into levels that are deeper and darker. There is something special about this planet because of its level of lower frequency and the freedom of choice. It is a huge step down for us who come from places that are less physical. I came in spite of that because I felt the need to experience the heavier levels.

The “I” Valencia refers to is her larger self, which gained a wealth of experience in other dimensions before first incarnating on earth. 

Many clients during their regressions seem to attain a higher perspective and speak as their larger, more knowledgeable self.

Almudena asks her guides why she feels she doesn’t belong on earth.

My guide is laughing. “You wanted to evolve quickly, didn’t you? Planet earth is the toughest school, the best university. The curriculum is tough.”

Almudena wonders where she came from.

I am getting that I am a very old soul. I haven’t been on this planet a lot. I have evolved on other planets in other universes that are beyond our human imagination. I have only had five incarnations on this planet. I chose the best university for continuing my learning.

Many eternal beings, like Almudena’s greater self, choose to incarnate here because it is a challenging and rewarding school. In many regressions, the guides emphasize that humans do not need to justify their presence on the planet. Just choosing to incarnate here is a courageous decision no matter how you live your life.

Beginning Souls

In Michael Newton’s book Destiny of Souls: New Case Studies of Life Between Lives, his clients describe newly created souls as “hatchlings.”6 One of my clients, Sofía, refers to them as “baby souls.”

Baby souls, when born, are just as cute as human babies. Everyone gets fussy about little adorable baby souls, just like they do with human babies on earth. A new little soul is a lovely, cute, playful being, like a baby kitten—so sweet and vulnerable.

Like babies on earth, new souls are nurtured and protected as they adjust to the energies and begin their schooling. The soul needs to learn first before incarnating as a human baby.

We can’t go to earth at that stage; we are too small. I can feel myself as that little energy. We have a lot to learn first. We have to grow up, like being in school. We are too vulnerable to be put in a body. We are in a fog, and we need the fog to protect us while we learn to get stronger and grow into a more capable soul.

The little soul’s foggy confusion is protective. No one can know everything at once. Each soul is exposed to new experiences, information, and semi-physical places before incarnating on earth. This includes simulated practice, which is not the same as actual incarnation.

Another client, Isa, learns that her soul is a teacher of young souls. In the place her soul calls home, she sits on an orb surrounded by circles of many young souls. Some of the classes are for souls who have yet to incarnate, and some are for those in between their early incarnations.

All are meditating and absorbing the light. They are eager to learn. I am their teacher and mentor, and they depend on me and trust me. I feel the energy from the orb travelling outward in a frequency that makes us one. We go through sensations and observe them and let them go. It is like waves on a beach coming and going. It is so familiar.

We practice this and eventually the group progresses to something else, and I have another new group of souls. Some returning from earth have dimmed light and are happy to be back home. They are learning to be calm and balance their emotions. With the energy of the orb and practice, they are recharged and brighter.

Isa notes that there are other souls who are more of a challenge to work with.

They are not stable; they change very quickly, like being indecisive. It is in their nature. They have a lot of energy. They like to experiment. They are willful and changeable. They trust me because I don’t tell them what to do.

From Isa’s description, we learn that new souls have different characters and qualities that can affect their behavior.

As pointed out earlier, new souls seem to be very delicate. They need to become accustomed to being in a physical body. During her regressions, Raquel recalls her first incarnations.

In the beginning, I had three lives to become familiar with being physical. I had to get used to having a heartbeat and a solid form and moving in a body with gravity and weight. I see a strange landscape of curved rocks. I was some sort of unusual animal. In the same place, I am now an alien in a humanoid form but not a Homo sapiens. Now, I have a smaller body, a being like a bird, but I feel a heaviness in the heart. Flying is hard. I am not used to the wings. When I am older and bigger, it is not so hard, but gravity is still challenging. My guides are asking me if I want to do this because I am going to be put into a Homo sapiens life. I say yes. It is experience. I feel determined and resolved.

The adjustment needed to begin incarnating on earth is a big step, even for those souls who have had previous experiences on other planets or in other dimensions.

Entry into Earth Life

As humans, we first incarnate on planet earth as innocent beings, dropped into unfamiliar territory without a map or a manual. Before we were born, we agreed to one specific condition: that once incarnated, we must forget our larger soul-self. Our soul wanted to experience human form so strongly that it accepted this restriction. This is why we can sometimes lack purpose in our lives—because we have forgotten the depths of our soul’s desire.

We arrive open and curious. Even though we retain some sense of our divine nature, we are here on the planet to integrate with our dense physical body. As a newborn, we don’t even know we have a physical body, and many months pass before we realize that our body is separate from everything and everyone else. Gradually, we become aware of our physical nature, developing our ability to use our bodies.

Physical bodies need food, water, and shelter. We must learn how to provide these essentials for ourselves. Also, the physical world is dangerous. We are naïve, and many difficult lessons await us.

It is not surprising that in early lives many souls choose to be born into tight-knit communities with established customs, prescribed laws, and strict standards of behavior. The group teaches us how to survive in a threatening environment. It also fosters close connection to others and gives protection to members. Usually, these groups have a strong spiritual connection expressed through religion, sacred songs and dances, and a close connection to the natural world. This resonates with souls new to the earth because group rituals and worship connect them back to Source energy. Because they thrive on connection to others, nature, and spirit, the lack of individual freedom does not worry them. Three cases illustrate the attraction to life in these protective communities.

During his regression, Cosmen is taken back to an early life as an Indigenous Australian.

I am male, a provider who hunts and gathers. Food is monotonous but abundant. We don’t have a lot of ups and downs in life. We live connected to the land. We have traditions but not rules. We don’t need rules. The traditions are the way we do things, the way we celebrate and honor our ancestors.

I ask what happens if someone doesn’t follow the traditions.

We might have to cast them out for the sake of the rest of us. We don’t survive as much as we exist. We don’t have the fear of survival. We have our challenges—lightning, storms, and fire—but we have our songs, our medicines, and our families.

Disruption does not serve the group. There is an understanding that any disrupters are not welcome, and they leave. We call them the lonely ones. It is not an active casting out. It is a natural process. We exclude them, and they choose to leave. They are still family, and we celebrate their choice. We honor them in our songs, in the earth, and in the stars. We grieve and we let go.

Some members will manage better than others, but it is a lesson in acceptance—accepting the grief, the choice, and the loss. The lonely ones leave because their energy doesn’t fit with the community. They are with us in word but not in spirit. We know that if they stay, in the long-term, their actions will not serve us. We are one, tuned in together, and harmonious.

During our early incarnations living in a tight-knit community, we accept our mutual reliance on others. Our interdependence also extends to our thinking. Generally, we concur with the collective mind of the group and quite naturally adopt its rules and practices.

In our second case, Caterina shows how comfortable and natural interdependence is for her in an early incarnation. She lives happily in a large, close-knit community made up of smaller nomadic groups.

I see a bright blue sky and the sun, in the middle of the day, shining down on barren, old mountains worn down over time. The ground is dry and sandy, like a desert, but there are patches of thin grass.

I am a young female of twelve attending to a rabble of goats. I am seeing a few skin shelters of nomadic families. I am happy tending the twenty or thirty goats, and it is an important job because the goats signify wealth and give milk.

We go to another scene.

I am inside and there is a gathering of many people, more than I have ever seen before, probably about fifty in a communal tent. Now I am about fifteen, sitting in amongst the crowd at the back. There are fire pits, and we are eating food that has been cooked in them.

We are here to pay allegiance to our leader. We admire him because he looks after us. He is the head, and each group has a leader who is underneath him. This gathering doesn’t happen very often, only once every several years. The timing is based on the stars and the seasons. We then go off on the nomadic routes that each group follows. We are somewhere in the Middle East.

I am getting an understanding of the importance of group cohesion. If you are not part of it, you cannot survive because life is already a hand-to-mouth struggle. I have been lectured about the rules, and this is deeply instilled, especially the emphasis on expulsion if you don’t fit in. The gathering is to reinforce the rules for the survival of all as well as sharing information.

I accept fitting in as a given. I am getting that these people are part of my extended soul group, and we have been incarnating together for a long time. I feel connected again. I can physically feel the connection of my heart chakra to Source, and now it is expanding. Particles of gold are washing over me, gently, like a mist. A path is opening up in front of me and I am floating along it. I feel I am suspended, and I received a message: “Welcome.”

The guides are saying that this is a significant life because it is telling me the importance of being connected to others but also recognizing that fear is not a state of integrity. I didn’t need to feel any fear because I was comfortable being a part of the group. I wasn’t resistant while others were. If they left, they lost the safety of belonging. It is important to know when you are surrendering and that surrendering is a joyful feeling.

You might note that both Cosmen and Caterina had little fear in these early lives. They didn’t feel like they were submitting because adherence to the rules of the group was so inherent and natural. Being connected to their community and its members, they felt safe and protected.

Group affinity is also evident in the members’ relationships with their elders and departed ancestors. In this life, Caterina has complete respect for the leader, who is responsible for the group’s welfare. And Cosmen, too, is respectful, expressing how he feels about those who die—not just his ancestors, but the lonely ones who had to leave.

We honor those who die. Our dead are always with us. We are connected to our ancestors, and we honor them directly. The ones who walk away we honor in spirit. We are connected by our stories. They provide us with perspective of their journeys as we learn through our dreams.

Interdependence is essential for survival when you have little experience of being physical and facing harsh conditions on earth.

Religious conclaves also provide a safe place for the newly incarnated soul. These communities are well-established, tightly structured, and allow members to engage in spiritual practices. In our third case, Alegría retains a strong connection to God in her life as a monk named Brother Martín.

I am in a monk’s outfit with peaked shoes, like slippers. I am around forty, with a tonsure hairstyle. I am standing here looking at this room, which is like a cellar with solid arches of red brick. I feel lightness. Something important happened here. I am calm and smiling, sensing something majestic but not knowing what it could be. I am picking up energy that is happy and joyful; actually, it is a calm joy.

I am curious, wondering why I feel so much peace in this place. It is a sacred place. I had a glimpse of someone dying here. [Cries.] I have a sense of quiet joy.

Even though no outside light comes into this room, there is a lightness here.

Now I see the past when I was here with a dying man. The man is my master, dressed in white, a beautiful being who has been a guiding light for me. He is a teacher in the monastery and has been a loving presence. I am there remembering the beauty of my master’s passing with much love. Not sad but happy.

As a monk, I have been with many people as they died. I remember one man with his grieving wife beside him. I am holding his hand, expressing love, nothing more, just love. I feel happy for his passing. It is his time. I keep getting a sense of the beauty of leaving. I know, without a shadow of a doubt, that the afterlife is a beautiful place and dying is a beautiful experience.

In a scene later in this life, Brother Martín is dying in the same room where his master passed.

I am lying in the red brick vault and my protégé is there. He is thin with a long nose. He feels a lot of love and respect toward me, and I am feeling love for him. He is ready but unsure. He feels my energy and joy, much the same as I did when I was in his position. He is feeling the human sadness of us parting but the beauty of me leaving.

I am anointing him. An anointing is just putting the hands on the anointed one’s shoulders. We know a transference is taking place. The energy is passed with the thought: “This is your path now.”

After passing, Alegría as her soul-self realizes why Brother Martín was so peaceful, loving, and accepting.

In that life as Brother Martín, I wondered why people [on earth] were angry and unhappy. I could be loving with these people because I saw dying as beautiful. I wasn’t afraid like others were. I didn’t have complete amnesia. I was deeply connected to God and didn’t feel violent or passionate. I was feeling too much love. 

Because Brother Martín had not completely forgotten his soul origins, he retained a strong connection to Source energy. His attention was still largely focused on heaven, his soul’s home. This is not surprising, for he was a young soul and a devoted monk. However, his ethereal presence meant that he could not relate to human emotions such as fear, grief, and anger. This limited his ability to help those who were lost in grief. After this life, Brother Martín’s soul decided to experience these emotions in depth so he could relate more closely with others. For many centuries, he planned and experienced some extremely challenging lives.

Masculine and Feminine Energies

Another focus of souls in their early lives is expressing feminine and masculine qualities in a pure form. Often, we choose to take on the same gender in a series of lifetimes in order to develop the essential elements of masculinity or femininity. As we progress through our many lives on earth, we eventually learn how to integrate and balance both male and female energies.

Jacobo, who you will meet in later chapters, mentions his development of protective male attributes in one of his sessions.

I just got a glimpse of my first life on earth. It was 25,000 BCE. I see a small settlement where I lived until I was two years old, when I died of the cold. But that life was useful, just a little taste of earth. The majority of my lives after that were peaceful, rural lives. I only fought when I needed to protect my family or community.

Fighting helped these men develop their physical skills and their sense of courage, which they needed to maximize their chance of survival. Strength and courage, used as a protective force, is important to souls wishing to engender healthy masculine energy.

Valentina experienced a life as a male in a matriarchy. In this life, the women were graceful, loving, and the source of sacred teachings. The men were strong, masculine, and protective. The men greatly respected the wisdom of the women and took their role as protectors very seriously. Valentina learned the difference between male and female energies and discovered the source of violence.

Female energy is like a peaceful stream, while male energy is like big waves and excitement. Male energy can be explosive. But heartless killing doesn’t come from male energy. It comes from emptiness.

Melisa had an early life in a community where pure feminine energy could be expressed.

It was a very exciting life, a feminine life of Picts and Celts worshipping Mother Earth and the goddess. It was a powerful time for females. Women were priestesses and medicine women, highly respected and a little feared. Men would ask for their wisdom. I liked that life and that form.

In our early lives, we often focus on expressing one gender in its raw, instinctive form to develop familiarity with that particular energy. Our long-term aim is to integrate the qualities of both male and female energy so that whatever gender we express in a life, we know how to balance it with its opposite.

Conclusion

As souls new to the earth, we arrive filled with hope and excitement. We are keen to experience this place of beauty and extreme contrast. We have been nurtured and lovingly schooled. Our preparation has included practice in simulations and on gentle planets. But the nonphysical lacks the heavy vibrations of earth. We come here as naïve souls inhabiting sensitive bodies, not knowing how to live in a place of such rich contrasts. Being too ignorant to make wise decisions, we choose life experiences that will help us adjust to the earth energies.

Close-knit, tightly regulated communities provide certainty, safety, and opportunities for young souls. We develop physical and emotional skills while surviving in a potentially hostile environment. The community fosters connection to each other and to the group. Its rituals and customs reflect a shared belief in an unseen world, populated by spirits or gods. We learn the ways of our gender and submit to the wisdom of the elders, respecting their care and guidance.

Yes, we face difficulties in our early incarnations, but they are relatively mild. As we adjust to the earth system, the challenges become greater, our lessons harder and more disorienting. In our next chapter, we see how some souls have faced these challenges.