CAPÍTULO 5. EFECTOS ACTUALES DE VIDAS PASADAS
Do Our Past Lives Affect This Life?
Everything that is today could not be if it were not for that which was before. ABRAHAM, CHANNELED BY ESTHER HICKS
From guiding many people through regressions, I have seen how our experiences in one life can influence our following lives. Quantum physics has revealed the amazing underlying reality of our world. Research by scientists such as Dr. Bruce Lipton and Dr. Ian Stevenson shows us how our past lives can affect our current lives.
Scientists tell us that everything is made up of energy. Quantum physics reveals that our material world is not really solid. Atoms, the basic component of the universe, are 99.99% space. Like an empty room containing air, an empty atom still contains something, namely an electromagnetic field. I think of this field as vibrational energy that we just perceive as solid and substantial.
Our emotions and thoughts also have a vibrational frequency. This we know intuitively. Our knowledge is reflected in our use of phrases such as ‘we were on the same frequency’ or ‘I sensed a strange vibe when I walked into the room’.
Dr. Bruce Lipton, biologist and researcher into stem cells, is the author of Biology of Belief. In that book he explains how our identity, our ‘self’, is not physical. He means we are more than our physical bodies. A membrane containing many receptors covers our cells. These receptors pick up vibrational signals from the environment. This environment includes our thoughts and emotions, which are vibrations. The membrane-covered cells are analogous to a TV set that picks up signals from a transmitter. What is this transmitter? Our true self. Our true self is not contained in the body. We could also refer to our true self as the soul. Dr. Lipton writes:
My self exists in the environment whether my body is here or not. Just as in the TV analogy, if my body dies and in the future a new individual (biological ‘television set’) is born who has the same exact set of identity receptors, that new individual will be downloading ‘me’. I will once again be present in the world. When my physical body dies, the broadcast is still present. My identity is a complex signature contained within the vast information that collectively comprises the environment.[6]
Our thoughts, emotions and experiences combine to create an informational package of vibrational energy. It is part of our soul’s fingerprint.
In his book, Dr. Lipton suggests that evidence for the ‘broadcast’ of an individual continuing even after death can be found in the experience of people who have had organ transplants.
The Heart’s Code, by Paul Pearsall, supports the idea that our individual personalities find expression at a cellular level. Pearsall shares stories about people who received organs transplanted from deceased donors. There are many examples of people who begin to exhibit aspects of the personalities of their organ donors. Dr. Lipton draws a powerful conclusion: ‘Cells and organ transplants offer a model not only for immortality but also for reincarnation.’
When we complete each life, the quality of our soul is changed by that Earth experience.
Dr. Thomas Campbell, the physicist and out-of-body researcher, theorises that the purpose of incarnating multiple times is to refine the quality of our consciousness, thereby lowering the entropy of the universe. Wisdom is the sole catalyst for refining our consciousness. Our wisdom increases as we gain knowledge and experience, and as we reflect upon all we have learned. Our consciousness is a culmination of all our previous experience.
Our memories of patterns of behavior, emphatic decisions, emotional stances and trauma are vibrations that manifest in the cells of our bodies, right from birth. The late Dr. Ian Stevenson, researcher into reincarnation, suggested that memories, habits, and even birthmarks can be carried over from past lives.
It appears that memories carry over when they have not been fully addressed and previously resolved. Resolution comes when we have the time, strength and inclination to explore and integrate the issue into every aspect of our being. If we turn our attention away from the issue, it remains repressed. This affects the quality of our soul. To be free, we need to resolve our issues at some point—maybe in our next life, maybe in a thousand years. To the soul, time is immaterial.
‘Very well,’ you might think, ‘but what about these lives we have between our lives? Can we resolve these issues after we die and before our next incarnation?’
Even if it is possible for souls to work on resolving issues in between incarnations, they need an Earth experience to test their progress. Our lives on this planet are intensely physical. This physicality enables us to separate good intentions from true resolve.
When we plan our lives at the soul level, we set up situations that will force us to confront our unresolved issues. For example, imagine that a young woman died of starvation in a past life. A fear of not having enough food might carry over into her next life. Initially, this fear lies dormant. Then one day, while still quite young, she hears her mother cry out because the cupboard is bare. Although this only happens once, this incident awakens her latent fear. As an adult, she begins hoarding food, without knowing why. Hoarding is her strategy for dealing with the underlying fear.
However, her fear still needs to be resolved. When her hoarding becomes a problem, this prompts her to address her fear of starvation. She might seek help to understand her behavior. What kind of help? A regression is one way of revealing the source of her hoarding behavior and resolving her fear.
Intense emotions, if they are not resolved, can easily be carried over from one life to another.
One of the most dangerous things you can do in life is to make a curse. Curses have great power because of the intense emotion that accompanies them. A curse can reverberate through subsequent lifetimes. Once the individual is aware of the curse and sincerely revokes it, the curse will no longer be active.
As the following case shows, the greatest effect of the curse is on the person making it.
Marisa
Marisa visited a past life where she suffered so deeply that she ended up railing against God.
Marisa lived as a pioneering woman somewhere in North America a couple of hundred years ago. The scene opens with Marisa burying her husband, who has died from a sudden illness. Apart from two children, a boy and a girl aged nine and eleven, she is alone. They live in an isolated cabin built on a gentle knoll that rises above the alluvial plains. A river curves around the perimeter of the property.
On a fine sunny day, the children are playing down by the river while Marisa is working in the vegetable garden near the cabin. Suddenly, Marisa sees a wall of water explode down the river. After the regression, she describes it as ‘like a tsunami’. She rushes down to the river, now flooded, calling for her children. They are gone. No matter how long she searches, they are never to be found.
Marisa is totally bereft. She has lost her husband and now her children. Her shock turns to anger. She cannot accept her loss. She is furious with God’s unfairness. She stands outside, near the river, looking up at the sky. As she shakes her fist at God she curses Him, vowing to never love children again. She is done with life and dies soon after.
In the next life, Marisa is a man. Tall, slim and sinewy, he lives alone. Cut off from his family and with no friends, he finds work wherever he can as he wanders from place to place. Living in various boarding houses, he keeps to himself.
This man feels very little for other people. He is empty and numb. There is only one thing that arouses his emotions—something too terrible to contemplate.
A soft, kind smile from a child hits him like lightning. He feels a quick softening inside him that he cannot tolerate. There is only one way to deal with this feeling. He kidnaps and kills the child. It is all about reclaiming his power. He feels driven to kill the feeling of love that briefly rises up in him and he does this by killing what he perceives as its source—the child.
One day, a child with a warm, loving smile comes up to him and gives him a flower. He feels himself soften for a moment. This feeling is terrifying. A deep yawning gap opens up in him. It is the emotion of loss, the great loss he suffered in the previous life. Of course, he doesn’t realise this. He just feels the deep pain. He is compelled to kill this feeling in himself. He captures a beautiful young girl of about eight or nine. He takes her away and, to his surprise, she remains open and trusting. She doesn’t seem to have any fear. Even as he kills her, there is a gentle questioning in her eyes. He is completely shaken. Shattered, he finally realizes what he has been doing. The guilt he feels is heavy. His career as a child killer is over.
Soon after, the authorities accuse him of murder and he is tried and is hanged.
He refuses to leave his body. He is terrified of hell, as he is sure that is where he is headed. Marisa is physically shaking with fear as she is recounts his demise and death. Eventually, after being sufficiently reassured, he floats away.
Marisa learns that she was carrying some of the guilt and fear passed down from this man, who had not been able to release it. For some time, she had been carrying an enormous fear of getting into serious trouble. She irrationally felt she might be sent to jail, or die. These emotions needed to be released. During the session, she feels an immediate sense of relief. Now, to be fully resolved and whole, she needs to come to terms with the criminal behavior of this man and find within herself the compassion needed to accept and forgive him.
Other emotions and attitudes can also be carried over between lives. In the following case, the major recurring emotion is guilt associated with the use of food.
Xabel
Xabel is overweight. He seeks a past life regression to gain a deeper understanding of his relationship with food. He intuitively feels that his weight problems originated in a past life.
In an earlier incarnation, Xabel lives as a nobleman in France around the fourteenth century. The scene opens on the evening of his sixteenth birthday. His father has put on a lavish display and invited all the important people to the celebration. A few people seem genuine and they greet him warmly. He soon realises, however, that nearly all of the guests are there to gorge themselves on the banquet and play politics with their associates and rivals. He is annoyed that his birthday is the excuse for their antics, and disappointed that his father is a part of it all.
This is when I start to become contemptuous. Some of them think they are so clever they can dance words around you. It is not worth responding. As soon as you do, you are part of their game. They think they are cleverer than those who don’t play.
They like to insult the ones who are genuine. They think I am stupid and not aware of what they are doing. I want to get away but I am not supposed to leave. I am a showpiece. That annoys me. Luckily they are not coming near me.
The tables groan under the weight of all the game, fruit and cheeses displayed on silver platters. Most of it will be discarded after the party. This upsets Xabel further. His father has overcatered deliberately: he wants his guests to notice how wealthy he is. Being excessive is part of the game. Xabel feels revolted. He is well aware that the ordinary people have very little.
They treat food like a weapon. They consistently give too much to themselves and too little to others. Then take it away from others as if it was just a game. They don’t care about the effect on others. If they see the effect, they justify it. They think they are better than everyone else. They think they are entitled to more. Power and entitlement go together. It is a game to them.
The scene changes. Some years later, Xabel is in charge of some of his older brother’s estates. He refuses to play the political games so beloved by his noble contemporaries. He cares about the people on his lands and doesn’t want to exploit them the way that others would, were they in his position.
I don’t want to play their little games. I want to make things run smoothly out here. I want this place to be home for people.
Unfortunately, Xabel and his people pay a high price for his fine principles. His lands are ravaged. Spanish soldiers on their way to fight a war up north pass through his estate, looting the farms and villages.
I feel like this shouldn’t have happened. I feel it is my fault but I don’t know how I could’ve stopped it. All the people are now gone. Their houses are empty. Everything was taken. They have nothing. Their food is gone. Everything is gone. There is no reason for them to come back. I should have stopped it.
Xabel is sure that the looting of his lands was less an act of thoughtless plunder than an act of treachery. One of the French nobility, who has a Spanish wife, encouraged the soldiers to come through and ravage the lands. Xabel was forewarned but could do nothing about it. He had no powerful allies to help defend his people. He has no friends to help him now seek justice. He knows he will get nowhere if he confronts the powerful people who allowed the soldiers to pillage with impunity. They will just deny any part in it.
Xabel is very disillusioned. He has never liked the way the world is. He cares about the poor people. He had tried to change one little part of it where he had some authority. But his good intentions came to nothing.
Years go by and Xabel’s older brother dies. Now the lands could pass to Xabel. But to take possession of the lands, he will need to play political games. He will need to form alliances against his cousins, who are maneuvering to seize the lands for themselves. He has to make up his mind to either plot and scheme to win what is rightfully his, or to walk away. He fears that if he stays he will need to compromise his values. If he leaves he will leave the fate of his people to others who do not care for them.
The next scene occurs after many more years have passed. Xabel is old and coming to the end of his life. He is not ill, but knows he will die soon. He lives in the castle because he won the title to his lands. He decided to stay and played the necessary political games.
Every day since then I have paid a price. Playing the game has become my life. Now I am one of the ones I feel contempt for. To be fair to my people I must often be less fair than I would like.
Xabel thought he was helping his people, but because of the decisions he has been forced to make, some of his people now hate him. He withheld food from his people to gain their compliance. He held lavish banquets, just like his father did, to shore up his alliances with the powerful nobility.
If you don’t have extravagant banquets, the nobility discounts you. And you need them for trade and defence. I don’t know how I am going to die but I am so tired, I cannot keep going on. I don’t have it in me.
When he finally dies in his canopied bed he is greatly relieved to pass over.
As he draws parallels between his past and current lives, Xabel realises that he uses food as a weapon. In his past life he used the threat of starvation to punish his people. He hosted sumptuous banquets to win favours from his fellow nobles. He hated himself for this. In his current life, he punishes himself by overeating.
I am bringing all the guilt I felt in that life into my current life. When I use food as a weapon in this life, I feel the same as I did in that past life where I used food as a weapon. The more I use food as a weapon, the worse I feel about myself.
In his life between lives, Xabel is told his dysfunctional relationship with food has arisen in several lives. He has developed a tendency to see food as a symbol rather than as the sustenance it really is, and this is playing out in his current life. For him food can symbolise punishment, a solution to a problem, or a much-desired reward.
In the next case, we are given a glimpse of all the human incarnations of a soul. This illustrates how recurring patterns of behavior develop over a number of lifetimes.
David
David had visited two past lives and his life between lives. You might recall David from a previous chapter where he was the monk, Desmonte, in one of his past lives. In his life between lives, he is given vivid information about all his previous past lives. This broad view paints a clear picture of his spiritual development over a series of lifetimes.
In his first incarnation, David is a Roman centurion wearing a bronze helmet, crested with flamboyant red plumes. He has great courage, fighting in many battles. With his men, he is often victorious. He remains in warrior roles in subsequent lives and continues to develop his courage.
After many lives as a warrior, he finds himself in a slightly different role: a spy. Again, he has several lifetimes spying for one side or another. He is caught and dies in many of the early lives. Gradually, he develops his spycraft. He learns to read people accurately, and this skill is carried over into subsequent lifetimes.
As a spy, he betrays others and is betrayed. He decides he needs to atone for the sense of guilt that gnaws away at his soul. He starts incarnating in religious roles, often as a monk. Over several lifetimes he lives as a devotee of all the major religions: Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism and Islam. He meets many inspiring people and comes to believe that he can free himself from the physical realm. He becomes a seeker of enlightenment.
Now his bid for enlightenment guides him through several lifetimes. During these lives, he gradually becomes more solitary and reclusive. He learns that this pattern of seeking solitude is also carried over from life to life. As he learns to love the monastic routine, he loses touch with the courage he developed in his early lives as a warrior and spy.
In his second-last life before his current life, he feels deeply let down. His many lives as a monk have left him increasingly disillusioned with the religious path. It is the time of the Reformation. He is exposed to the politics and hypocrisy of those in the church. He has an opportunity to develop new directions, but he falls back on his old patterns. Sometime after his sessions, David reflects on what he has learned.
The lifetimes revealed to me by my guide showed an incremental progression, with many of my habits, strengths and weaknesses crossing lifetimes. Many of my career choices were similar across lifetimes, starting from the military, progressing to intelligence gathering, and to religious institutions. I only shifted my life purpose when my circumstances during the Reformation provoked an epiphany. However, I still struggled to break the habits I’d developed during my previous lives.
David was fortunate enough to be given an overview of all his lives during his sessions. He could clearly see the connection between each life and the patterns he developed.
The regressions of these three clients give us a glimpse of the powerful effect our past lives can have on our current life. A few other cases, briefly reviewed below, confirm this power. They help demonstrate that numerous challenges, including emotions, memories and patterns of behavior, can be carried over from lifetime to lifetime.
One client had many lifetimes as an alcoholic. In his previous life, he had died penniless and drunk. Even his knowledge of this repetitive, destructive pattern of behavior was not enough to permanently break this long-standing habit.
Another client came to see me because he had lost his purpose in life. A regression revealed that he was here to help his brother, Santiago. Santiago didn’t cope well with setbacks in his physical lives. When things became too tough, Santiago took an early exit. There were several lifetimes where he demonstrated this pattern of bailing out, including the First World War when he climbed out of the trenches to run into enemy fire. My client had lost his way after Santiago committed suicide a few years earlier. Wearily, my client informed me, he would be coming back in his next life to try once more to help Santiago stay grounded.
Two of my clients experienced past lives where they were pregnant. Both were nearly full term when they died. The first starved to death at the end of the Second World War. The second was of high birth living in Ancient Egypt. Her noble origins could not save her from a fatal illness. At the moment of death, neither wanted to leave her body or her baby. Such grief, carried over from moments of trauma, manifested differently in their current lives.
The first developed an eating disorder when she and her husband decided to try for a baby. She spent more than a year intermittently overeating until she came to see me. I took her back to her death from starvation in the Second World War, which gave her the opportunity to release her grief over her lost baby. She later told me that she conceived on the evening after our session. She gave birth to a healthy baby girl, and her eating disorder never returned.
The second became emotional whenever she was near a baby. This tearfulness had occurred all her life. She felt embarrassed because she didn’t understand her tears. Once her past life grief was released, the sadness she’d felt around babies vanished completely.
Conclusion
Many people have benefited from discovering and releasing issues that had their genesis in past lives. Brian Weiss, author of Many Lives, Many Masters, and Michael Newton, author of Journey of Souls, have publicised this powerful phenomenon. Every day, practitioners trained by the Newton Institute confirm the benefits of exploring our past lives. Once they are liberated from their blocks, fears and emotional reactivity, people can approach their lives with a renewed sense of purpose. From my personal experience of accessing and releasing my own past life traumas, I can attest that the benefits are real and permanent. Every time I released a past life issue, I felt lighter, more confident, and filled with a sense of freedom.
I have noticed that some clients sense intuitively that certain issues manifesting in their lives are related to a past life. They may have tried more conventional psychotherapies, without isolating the cause of their distress. I always trust a client’s intuition and, almost without fail, their intuition is correct.
However, many clients encounter and release past life issues that were not evident before they came for their session. Only after they emerge from their trance can they see the relationship between their past lives and their current life. They are always pleased to be relieved of these unanticipated and unresolved issues.
It is worth remembering that positive patterns of behavior also develop over many lifetimes. David, for example, learnt to cultivate courage during his many lifetimes as a warrior. Although the effect was dissipated during his religious lives, he was soon able to reconnect with that courageous energy and make the significant changes needed to get his life back on track. His case also demonstrates how we develop skills that carry over from life to life. He developed the ability to maintain order and routine. From his monastic lives, he also learned to be independent and enjoy his own company, with no fear of loneliness. Of course, making progress requires us to find the right balance between competing demands, and now David now needs to develop his relationship skills.
I can only be in awe of the creation of this amazing universe where we are given unlimited opportunities to develop and evolve. Eventually we can enjoy this wonderful physical reality by learning how to create the experiences we desire, without the traumas we suffered in past lives.
