Posted by Roberta Grimes • March 06, 2021 • 54 Comments
Human Nature, Understanding Reality
Jesus loves the little children,
All the little children of the world.
Red and yellow, black and white,
They are precious in His sight.
Jesus loves the little children of the world!
– Clare Herbert Woolston (1856-1927), from “Jesus Loves the Little Children” (1800s)
Anyone who has spent time with a tiny baby has wondered where all the amazingly distinctive traits of newborn children come from. On a superficial level, every newborn child looks and acts like every other child; but parents will tell you that almost from birth each baby has a unique personality. As a mother of three, I am certain that when I looked into the eyes of each newborn bundle, the person that child later grew to be was already complete and inside there, calmly looking back at me.
Scientists believe we are just our material bodies, so they are certain our personalities must somehow arise as a natural function of those bodies. They think that who we are most likely happens in our material brains, although of course they still have no idea about the process or any of the details. And they cannot even hazard a guess as to why an entirely material humanity would bother to have separate personalities at all! Scientists live in a material world. To them, we are meat and nothing more. But you and I now understand that reality is not material. We know that we are eternal beings, that each of us lives many lives, and that every newborn in its mother’s arms is already an ancient being who has bravely planned to live yet another lifetime in which to learn and grow spiritually. Knowing the truth about who and what we are, you and I realize that each newborn child is the complex product of a long, mysterious, and probably fascinating history!
For us to talk about the traits of babies may seem at first to
be a diversion from our discussions here that have centered of late on consciousness, Jesus, God, and the meaning and purpose of human life. But in reality, the innate characteristics of babies are at the nexus of all these topics! It is in babies that so much of what we are learning about the greater reality self-integrates. Babies are the fruit, if you will, and the ultimate test of all the truths that we have been researching and patiently trying to fit together in an effort to make some sense of it all.
When I was first researching life after death, what in the end convinced me that life goes on was hundreds of documented communications from the dead that had been received before 1940. They had come through physical and deep-trance mediums in southern England and in the eastern United States over at least half a century of time, and yet all the communicators were obviously speaking from the same gigantic place! The same process, the same physics, the same pastimes, and all the same details: it was like reading hundreds of communications from travelers who all had just arrived in Fiji. I realized then that for all these reports to be so entirely consistent would have been statistically impossible if the afterlife where they said they were now was not entirely real.
And each new baby gives us a similar opportunity to test our evidence-based understanding of humanity’s place in the greater reality. We know now that every human mind is eternal. We know that each of us lives many different lives on earth – and elsewhere in this universe, too – with each life carefully planned and guided to give us the greatest opportunity to experience and push against negativity, and thereby to ever better grow spiritually. We know or suspect that a great many things might impact a child now entering a newly planned earth-lifetime. In fact, with all that we now know about the venerable being that chose to use that new life as a vehicle for spiritual growth, it would be amazing if new babies did not already have distinct personalities!
With all that we have learned so far about what might be influencing a newborn’s life, let’s look at how those influences could reveal themselves as each child starts to grow. The kinds of traits described here might be apparent from birth, or they may seem to arise later. And some of them will affect that child’s entire life:
based, that tends to plague us when we are in bodies. And we have access to our entire minds when we are there, which means that we can be comfortably certain that our lives are indeed eternal. So we are a whole lot happier! This nicer base personality that is who we are at home sometimes carries over as a base for our after-birth personality.
negative stressors so we can push against them and thereby grow spiritually. For a few of us there may be more going on, but for most of us that is the whole story. So when bad things happen to good people, those aren’t bugs at all. They’re features! We plan for illnesses, alcoholic parents, marital problems, career calamities, and any of a hundred other earthly crises as great potential spiritual stressors.
life, many children will have traces of active memories of a recent prior earth-lifetime, and especially of the violent death that ended it. Dr. Ian Stevenson of the University of Virginia made a specialty of studying and writing about such cases.With so many factors potentially influencing each newborn baby’s entire life, it’s no wonder that human beings at birth are so amazingly different from one another! And as we grow, all these different factors conflict with one another and wax and wane in us, so scientists who still willfully insist that each newborn is only meat and nothing more are flat unable to understand the complex 
psychology of all human minds. The study of the afterlife inevitably leads to the study of the greater reality. And everything that we have learned about the amazingly complex reality in which we live our eternal lives finds its complex fruition and its validation in the miracle of each newborn child.
Jesus loves me, this I know,
For the Bible tells me so.
Little ones to Him belong.
They are weak, but He is strong.
– Anna Bartlett Warner (1827-1915), from “Jesus Loves Me” (1862)
Roberta, this is a personal comment and not for the blog. My comment has 2 parts. First, your blog today about children was a synchronicity. Yesterday, I spent the morning with one of my youngest grandsons. As we hiked in the snowy woods ( Buffalo, NY) and I listened carefully to what he was saying, I said to myself” how in the world does this kid know this stuff after only being around 5 years?!! Of course the answer is that he has lived many lives before!!! Also, your blog was a bonus for me because it ties all the concepts you mention in your books into a nice bow! Second comment: That was a really nice podcast you had with the 2 guys on sleep. First, because the information was important. Often I have shoot for 8 hours a night but due to insomnia get 6. I need to improve my efforts. Secondly, these guys were funny, especially the Australian chap!!. So, you gave us 2 very nice gifts this week!!! Thanks again, Dave
Oh my dear David, thank you for posting this private comment for others to enjoy!
Oh my goodness, I gather that you are rich in grandsons? I have three, but I have known just one of them from babyhood, although I have known three of my granddaughters for their whole lives. I held all four of them on the day they were born! So I know the joys of listening to grandchildren as they learn and grow through their early years. Having grandchildren is so much more wonderful than having children, isn’t it? Rearing your own child – being the one in charge – is a staggering responsibility. But spending a lot of time with grandchildren as their gleeful and somewhat irresponsible and too indulgent older playmate is a joy that no one should miss!
I’m glad that you find this post to be a synthesis of some of what is said in our books! The topic of this one came directly from Thomas. I didn’t even see the point of it at first, but now of course I get it and I think he has given us a wonderful synthesis!
And yes, I enjoyed doing that SR interview. I was hesitant about the sleep guys at first, since I thought we might be venturing too far afield; but their agent was persistent, and I have heard from several listeners that they got a kick out of that program!
Thank you as always, dear David, for keeping me on my toes 🙂
Twins were born; one healthy, the other one sickly and worsening. They were separated as a matter of caution against infections. The sick child’s condition worsened. One nurse courageously put the healthy baby next to the sick one, and at one point the healthy baby put her arm around the sick one. Soon, the sick baby got totally better, which remained inexplicable from a medical perspective. If we are just meat, such miracles could never happen. Scientists who adhere to the “meatology” point of view have their heads in the sand of ignorance.
I agree, Adrian. Until they allow “equal time” to both the material and spiritual, they will never get the full answers they so desperately seek. I think the healthy twin transferred some of her or his energy to the sick one. That may sound silly, but twins are psychically connected for life.
Oh my dear Adrian, this was in the news just a few years ago. I remember it well! And there was a widely-seen photo of the healthy newborn twin with its arm around the sickly one. I thought at the time that what we were being told by discarnates was being shown there to be true: some physically healthy babies will die at birth or shortly thereafter simply because the awful sense of being in a body again and facing another whole lifetime overwhelms their courage. If that is indeed true, then apparently the love of the twin who shared the womb with you can bolster your sense that you really can do this after all!
I had a friend/co-worker who was obsessed with pianos since she was 2! She would leave dozens of cool toys and go directly to any piano that was in sight. Of course, it was all gibberish, but by; the time she was in her late teens, she was known for how beautifully she played the piano. I am convinced that she did this before in a prior lifetime. Ian Stephenson’s book is chuck full of kids recalling a past life. Little kids remember because they are not fully focused on their physical life yet
Dear Lola, I have come to conclude that Ian Stevenson’s study-set is a discrete group of people who died by violence ad not at a planned exit-point, and they consequently never transitioned. Instead, those who talked about where they had been for the year or three between the previous personality’s death and their recently-begun new lifetime, they generally said they were floating around or hanging out in a tree near where they had died. One said that a pregnant woman walked below his tree one day, and she looked as if she would be a good mother, so he jumped into her fetus (which suggests that this was a case of spirit-possession). Fascinating cases! But not at all how reincarnation customarily works 🙂
I know that a number of his cases included violent deaths, but I don’t understand why some victims of traumatic deaths are met with kind and helpful angels or guides, while others are just “hanging out” because no one is there to help them. so they jump into an unplanned reincarnation.
Dear Lola, Mikey Morgan tells us that almost 25% of those who die on earth will go off-track for a time. And most of them will need to be rescued. I fought that notion when he first said it, but I have since done some research that suggests that his estimate is pretty accurate. When you are dying at a planned exit-point (even if the exit is via an “accident”), then your loved ones will be there to rescue you. If you find yourself standing in spirit beside a wrecked car and you call for help, an upper-level being will appear pretty quickly. But if someone just plain shoots you in the chest and you don’t call for help, you are very likely to end up just hanging out in a tree for awhile!
I know, so I wonder if the victim even knows he is dead. Silver Birch who was mentioned last week, said that some don’t believe they are dead even after being told they are. I recall Mikey’s estimate of 25% but I thought it would have been even higher. Until recently, hardly anyone ever addressed this very important issue, and the Christian churches have completely ignored it..
Roberta, I believe there are no coincidences. So let me share a story with you. My husband made his transition ten months ago. My grandson and his wife are expecting a baby boy next week. This morning I started reading your article about precious babies and felt the need to send the link to my grandson and his wife. My grandson called me when he got my email and before he had a chance to read it. They have been adamant that they will not reveal the baby’s name until after he is born. During the conversation, my grandson let it slip. They named their baby boy after my husband. And even though they planned to tell no one until after he was born, I was the first to know (by “accident”). I was overwhelmed with emotion and couldn’t talk. When we hung up, I glanced out my window and there was a beautiful red cardinal looking at me from a tree in my backyard. So I wanted to thank you for starting my day with such a magical “coincidence.”
Oh my dear Janelle, how wonderful! And your husband is clearly tickled about his coming little namesake – he sent you a cardinal so you could celebrate together!
The Source or God as some refer it is Love-total love which is empathetic in my mind. When we choose our next life no matter how we wish to grow, to learn, to raise our vibrations, Why would we choose to die in a Nazi prison camp, or burned or tortured to death etc.? We have Guides to help us choose, do we not? And the Source which is Love would not want this, I can’t believe. Why then would any soul want to return to that pain? Thank you.
Hi Barbara , hopefully someone will give us both insight into that question: I struggle with theses issues as well, also all the millions of starving babies in under developed countries that we see on television .I believe in re incarnation but millions of children suffering I truly struggle to get my head around that one. Roberta can you help ? Ps loved this blog ❤️💙❤️💙❤️ …
Dear Louise and Barbara, one thing that we must always keep in mind is the fact that we plan and enter these lifetimes with the intention that they will be difficult, stressful, and even painful. And then once we have been born, our own free will and the free will of everyone around us can cause us to have to endure even more stress and pain than we had contemplated during the planning stage; but yet, these added difficulties can be wonderful spiritual growth opportunities. What looks to us from here to have been an awful life might seem to the eternal being who experienced it to have been quite spiritually productive!
Barbara, We cannot have any meaningful conception of what is good without also having its contrast, I like to quote this observation to make the point
” There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, “Morning, boys, how’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, “What the hell is water?”
—David Foster Wallace, This Is Water ”
If all we ever knew about was God’s love, we could not fully appreciate it.
Our lives are hard by design, because in Heaven we have no stresses and pain, only bliss.
So to answer why does God permit so much pain and evil here, because it is truly educational. What we live here is only a brief educational flicker of our eternal being.
If our lives are part of a “plan,” then the ones committing the evil acts must be part of the plan too. Negative entities find it easy to invade the minds of those who were horribly abused during their childhood, and this happens far more often than the average person is aware of.
Re evil being part of the plan–NO. We have free will, so a person may react to their infirmities with anger, or make the best of their gifts.
Re people with abuse during childhood, they may of course have their outlook colored by that, and be pessimistic. But again to say, we have free will, and a conscience, so falling into evil ways has no good excuse. “The Devil made me do it,” is a bad joke.
Dear Jack, this is very well said. Of course, resisting the temptation to do bad things was a lot harder back when we thought this one life was all we had and we didn’t understand the consequences that our supposedly private bad acts could have for us eternally. I sometimes wonder how different human history might have been if the general knowledge that is about to break on humankind about what always has been going on had been available to us hundreds of years ago!
Dear Lola, there is some evidence that people will plan to put themselves into a situation on earth where doing bad things will be a temptation because successfully resisting that temptation will also strengthen us spiritually. And sometimes, of course, we won’t manage to resist. There is anecdotal evidence that Adolf Hitler had planned during that lifetime to resist the temptation to try to take over the world and he instead meant to focus on his art!
Hi Barbara. After seeing 60 Minutes awhile back, the Syrian torturers seem particularly horrible. I hear what Mr Hiller is saying, but I just can’t grasp how anyone needs that much negativity.
I agree, Ray. Negativity is one thing, but when it is this extreme, it is just pure evil.
Ray, I actually agree with you, and have “complained” to God for years that we can learn the contrasts between good and evil without the superabundance of evil in this world.
At least for the horror of the Jordanian pilot that ISIS burned alive, as an example, his soul escaped that torture by leaving as soon as the stress got high enough.
Dear Jack, it is a standard thing that when a painful death is happening, the one experiencing it is out of his body. People who died in car crashes will tell us that they suddenly went right through the car’s roof and saw the crash happen from above; those who died under torture will talk about having been whisked out of the body and then watching it happen with a kindly being (probably their spirit guide) right there to comfort them.
I’ve heard that too, and I sure hope it’s true. Dying in an accident is one thing, but having to endure senseless torture is quite another.
Dear Ray, planning a lifetime that flirts with negative stressors really can’t be calibrated in advance. We come to earth specifically so we can experience negativity in a situation in which we believe we will simply use it for spiritual growth in our own lives; but then we will get here, and those whose life-plan had put them into a situation where their temptation is to resist doing bad things to other people will fail their own self-imposed stress test to the point where they are doing vastly horrible things. Especially since we don’t know while we are in bodies that this is all basically just an artificial war-game, it is so easy for these things to get out of hand!
Dear Barbara, it is difficult to properly understand how powerful we feel as we are planning our earth-lives, and how minor even awful earth-events really look to us from there. When it is known that some big disaster is coming on earth and there are bodies available that will let people become part of it, there will be very well-attended classes to help people think about dying in a war, in the Holocaust, in the Armenian Genocide, or what else have you. The opportunity for spiritual growth in these situation is so tremendous that people will seize on them eagerly!
Thank you Roberta for a very interesting post, especially the other life gender part.
Some time ago I touched on that same subject in a different forum, but it is not an easy one, that’s for sure!
I will start here with your own beginning, and please don’t feel offended!
I would like to comment that just because you at puberty suddenly liked being a girl does not mean it is the same for everyone.
Many girls and boys are deeply unhappy at puberty, and once breasts, periods, beards, deep voices and tall bodies have developed, it is much harder to make changes if that is still a deep desire.
But couldn’t those unhappy young people just put up with it and for instance form bonds with the same sex? Of course, and many do. Many also simply live a life of lies, never “coming out”.
However, these days of medical miracle after miracle, in some parts of the world sex changes are possible. Not cheap!
Some young pre puberty kids who have understanding parents have had a sex change just in the nick of time and are over the moon with happiness.
But what if they change their minds, can the operations be reversed? Apparently this has happened, so everybody must be very sure about it all before anything is done, and there are all these assessments, also by psychologists.
But think of all those who marry, the normal way, sure of “till death us do part” but five years later something else is parting them!
Believing in the eternal life in both ends, I just wonder why somebody before birth would decide to be born as the “wrong sex”?
Well, the only thing I can think of is trying to be in others’ shoes and become a bit more tolerant.
Gerda.
Dear Gerda, the important question really is WHY young children might be gender-confused! Knowing the way I felt, and the reason why I felt that way, I surmise that many more children than we realize have this problem and likely want to change genders until puberty straightens them out. So the fact that an overwhelming majority of children who wanted to change genders at 12 are entirely gender-integrated at 17 makes perfect sense! Some studies say that as many as 90% of children have this confusion cured by simply growing up!
Are some children “born in the wrong body”? No. Gender is chosen, or the gender of a chosen fetus is at least accepted as not conflicting with that individual’s life-plan. It is conceivable that someone could build deliberate gender-confusion into his life-plan, but then the confusion itself would have been planned to be the stressor.
Are some children who were transitioned before puberty happy in the end? Maybe. But a great many young people who were transitioned before they were adults are not happy as adults with their having transitioned. That is a fact! And the changes made are in fact irreversible. Once they remove the penis and fashion a vagina, there is no way to go back to being a functioning adult male! And the implants they will give to try to reverse a girl who had her breasts removed before she decided to go back to being a female will never give her the joy of nursing her own child. Which may not be the loss that it seems, of course, because many who transition so early end up sterile in any event.
It is important to emphasize here, too, that it is impossible really to change a body’s gender. No matter what we do, every cell of that body will remain the birth-gender for life! So who are we really fooling here?
Dear Gerda, this has nothing to do with being “a bit more tolerant.” If a 25-year-old wants to change genders, then I’m all for it! But knowing how easily my being born today would have put me into the unsympathetic hands of doctors whose careers depended on their persuading a 13-year-old me to derail my life-plan and destroy my life, I will say this again, and more emphatically. To do things to children’s bodies to mimic the opposite gender before those children have sexually matured and are able to make such an irrevocable choice is pure evil. It should be a capital crime!
I was always under the impression that gender identity issues derived from being of the opposite sex in a prior lifetime. But it is likely this condition could be a voluntary choice just like any physical impairment.
Tom: I too thought that certain gender issues show up in a subsequent life time, but it could also be a choice with others, so I think both answers are correct. Many issues (not just gender issues) kind of bleed over into the current lifetime, as shown by hypnotic regression.
Dear Tom, you are right, of course. But the insidious thing is that preteen girls are the most cliquish, faddish people on the face of the earth, and at the moment “being transgender” is one of the things they are being cliquish and faddish about. Studies show that when one popular 12-year-old girl decides that she is transgender, then often several of her friends will soon self-identify the same way. What are the odds…? 🙁
Dear Tom, indeed the most common reason for pre-puberty gender confusion is a switch from the opposite gender from the last lifetime to this one. And if the switch is from many lifetimes as the other gender, then the adjustment can feel more extreme, as it did in my case. (And I realize now that when I was small and for a long time afterward, my being a female kind of grossed Thomas out. Eww! He was so used to me as his many-male-lives buddy that he had trouble adjusting, just as I did.)
Actually, I think the reason that so few children have gender confusion is that we tend to stick with a preferred gender for most of our lifetimes, unless there is a reason to be the other one for some individual lifetime (as was the case with me – Thomas thought that people would take what I have learned and now teach better coming from an older lady than coming from a man of any age). My hunch is that everyone who takes an opposite-gender lifetime is probably confused before puberty, as I was.
And no, gender is not a choice. When it is hard-wired into our bodies from conception, so actually changing genders is factually impossible, people who are born in their consistently-preferred gender are not going to have it occur to them to try out of the blue to be the opposite gender!
Hi Roberta,
This week’s post was unexpected and exciting.
I love that we have a hand in planning our lives here. It is sort of amusing to me because I ask myself often why would I have chosen this trait or that circumstance? Certainly, if I had a choice, I would have chosen something different, and if I chose this circumstance to learn a spiritual lesson, have I learned it yet?
Still, there are obvious things about my personality that come from my parents and that biological connection. There is a sort of melding of our spiritual being and physical being while we are alive. It’s comforting to know that our spiritual being not only survives but flourishes and we return to our source stronger, even though our physical body vanishes.
I have not even mentioned to my family that I now believe incarnation is real; they would surely think that I had joined some cult or something. But it is so much more powerful to think our growth here is preserved and goes on and on and we return to our source, not as subjects but as part of the eternal realm.
Peace and love,
Tim
Dear Tim, the most important things for us to realize about the life-planning process that we all undergo before entering each lifetime are probably these two:
1) We aren’t planning for a fun and happy time! Instead, we are planning for stress and negativity. From there, life on earth feels awful anyway, and the worse it is, the more we are likely to get in terms of growth from the experiences of that lifetime.
2) There are many factors that go into and make up each lifetime. There are the spiritual lessons that we most want to work on; the issues with other people that hang on from other lives and need to be addressed (people now call this karma); the tasks that we may be helping others with – we are in that sub-play, but we are not the star; the genetic details of the body we have chosen; and other things, too. In my case, my spirit guide wants me to finish some tasks for him, and I am doing that as well.
Life-planning really is complicated!
Timothy, my studies lead me to believe that. just as Roberta tells us, our eternal spirit attaches to a body for a life and that spirit is a principle driver in behavior. But the body itself has a “lower” form of its own consciousness that also drives behavior. Freud’s analysis of conscious and unconscious resources affecting behavior would be accurate if he assigned the function of the moral Super Ego to soul, the Id to the body, and the Ego as the brain’s functionality for responding to the environment with input from soul and Id.
Dear Jack, I haven’t much studied the idea that the body has a separate consciousness. Do you have a citation for that? I don’t think that Freud’s analysis is objectively accurate; at least, it doesn’t seem to comport with what we are told is true by those not in bodies. And I have come to think that “soul” is a purely religious term, and that it refers to the mind – to that part of us which is eternal. Thinking about this now, I really do think that we need to really study these terms and how they fit with what our observations suggest!
Roberta, In general, the philosophy of Pantheism recognizes that everything made by God from God possesses consciousness. During the Out of Body Experience when spent in Heaven, the spirit observes that everything there exudes consciousness, even water, rocks, grass, etc. I have documented thee specific OBE cases in which the body continued to behave even though its soul separated. For example, a motorcycle driver hit by a truck had an NDE, and as his spirit watched, when the truck driver came over to help, his body punched the driver. In another case, as a swimmer felt he was drowning and went ouit of body his body continued to swim to shore.
Wow, that’s very interesting. It seems that the physical body and the spiritual one both had a conscious awareness of the same event.
Dear Jack, hmmm. Let’s take these points individually.
1.) No one who returns from an NDE or an OBE has ever actually been to where the dead are. They are in the gigantic astral plane. An important difference!
2.) The key to being alive is the silver cord, which connects the body to its animating spirit.
3.) I have never seen evidence that a body without an animating spirit has any animating spirit or life-force of its own at all. When someone is out of body at a time when the body is in extremis but not dead, he/she has not yet severed the silver cord, and we know that because the person re-entered the body and lived to tell the tale. So the body is still alive and attached to its animating spirit at all times, which means that it can punch, continue to swim, etc. Once the silver cord is severed, all activity will permanently cease.
Hi Roberta, hi everybody! It is important to contemplate that this experience we perceive as incarnation actually begins prior to conception and that, in fact, our first years on earth may actually be a time when we have experiences that overlap between this and our eternal awareness and relationships to the Godhead.
I don’t have much to add to Roberta’s fine analysis of the lives of babies and our own growth from aspect of the Godhead and an eternal being to a human being and back again. But I do think it is amazing to contemplate. For much of human history, child mortality rates were such that many didn’t make it beyond their infancy, so society didn’t give children much thought. Now we realize it may be true that on some level, whether we can cite details or not, we all come into this experience with a notion of the fact that our eternal existence our true identity.
But here is a question that occurs to me as I read this particular blog post — it almost sounds as if physical bodies and fetuses could and maybe do exist independent of spirit and we “slip into them.” Those physical bodies could, indeed, be another and independent manifestation of the Mind of God and could then have, as one commenter above postulated, a life force and experience of their own?
So when the physical body dies, its life force dies with it and the spirit body’s life force (or consciousness) takes over. Is that what you mean? Is that what is meant by surviving death?
Dear Lola, what seems to be the case is that a physical body is really just organized meat. It’s a vehicle. A human spirit attaches to it in utero, and usually very early in its development; and it is then able to be independently alive outside the womb. That attachment is by an incredibly stretchy glowing umbilicus of energy which was first noticed in ancient times – the term “silver cord” comes from the Bible – and when that silver cord breaks, the physical body ceases to function. There seems to be no ability for it to survive without constant attachment to a spirit. And the spirit is eternally alive, whether it is currently attached to a physical body or not. The attribute of “life” is the essence of its very nature.
Dear Mike, I don’t think that a body can live without an animating spirit. There is some evidence actually, but it is thinly scattered:
1) Most fetuses seem to have an animating spirit even before conception. The spirit then attaches to the body very early in its development, but generally spends most of gestation out of the body because being in a fetus is bo-o-oring!!
2) If there is no animating spirit at conception, the mother’s body can nurture that fetus without a spirit in it, and apparently can do this for many months if needed. So the spirit can attach later in the fetus’s development.
3) Sometimes a spirit attached to a fetus will decide at some point in that fetus’s development that conditions for the life that was planned are no longer in place, and the spirit will decide to leave during gestation.
4) Every fetus that is without a spirit, either because it didn’t have one at conception or because the one who first attached has left, is able to continue to develop until birth.
5) Apparently for this to happen is rare, since there are many more spirits who want another earth-lifetime than there are available fetal bodies, but if a full-term infant is delivered without a spirit, apparently it dies when the umbilicus is severed.
No, I’m trying to find some evidence from all my research that the body kind of has its own spirit-like animating existence, but I really can’t recall ever having seen any!
Thanks, Roberta! Despite my posing the question, I was not inclined to think the physical experience of a human body could be had without the spiritual experiencer.
Yes, dear Mike, and nicely put!
Hi Roberta. I have recently come across discussion, especially in shamanic literature or forums, of healing trauma that we might somehow inherit, whether genecically or some other way, from physical ancestors, possibly many generations back. This would be a whole new wrinkle beyond just spiritual karma, like a sort of ancestral karma (as if our own past lives weren’t enough to deal with!) Have you come across anything in your research that would support this, and what is your opinion on this idea?
Dear Scott, I know there are some spiritual traditions that hold such beliefs, but I have never seen any real evidence that past-life trauma can be passed down genetically. And it would have to be genetic transmittal, since the body that had the trauma has long ago entirely died! Not sure how the trauma would make it into the gonadal tissue of a living person in order to be passed on; or how it might be passed on at all. No, dear, I don’t think so!
The research from Ian Stevenson on those who passed from trauma implies that there is a genetic component passed along. In Stevenson’s documented cases of reincarnation, the child was born with marks on the body corresponding to the manner of the previous death ( https://www.amazon.com/Where-Reincarnation-Biology-Intersect-Stevenson-ebook/dp/B001E0O29K/ref=sr_1_2?crid=FJBB7Y42L92R&dchild=1&keywords=ian+stevenson+reincarnation&qid=1615689764&s=books&sprefix=Ian+S%2Cstripbooks%2C212&sr=1-2 ). Also, in many of the readings by Edgar Cayce. he found that a current ailment traces to a related problem in a former life.Re the body behaving on its own after the soul has gone out of body, in the third case (which I did nit mention) the person reported seeing the silver thread, while in the other two that I did mention, they did not notice the thread.
It is also significant that when the OBE included a trip to what appears to be Heaven, they reliably report that everything there exudes consciousness.
Dear Jack, you make a great point about Dr. Stevenson’s cases of reincarnated children whose previous lives had ended traumatically, but it isn’t genetics that makes the marks of their prior death-wounds show up on their new bodies. It’s their minds!
These are very specific cases. The children had died violently at the end of their prior life, mostly by being murdered, so all these deaths had three factors in common:
1) The death was outside the usual planning process,
2) It was unexpected and nearly always emotional-filled, and
3) The child did not have the benefit of the usual death process, which amounts to a love-filled rescue and transition to the afterlife.
So these children never properly ended the prior life. They were among the nearly 25% who don’t completely transition right away, so they never had the arrival in the afterlife, life-review, party, etc. They never really left the mental state that they had at the time of death.
Based on the memories of some of these children, most of them just hung around in the vicinity of their untimely death and eventually jumped into the fetus being carried by a pregnant mother walking nearby.
So since they still had the mindset they had had at the prior death, some of their new bodies carry what look like scars from their prior life’s death-wounds.
I haven’t much studied Cayce, but there as well I think that any bodily malady in any new lifetime comes from the mind and not the body, and in the case of a normal reincarnation it could even have been created as part of the life-planning process.
And, again, no one who comes back to tell the tale ever has actually died. During NDEs and OBEs, the mind leaves the body, the silver cord remains attached, and the mind – often in an astral body – travels in the vast astral plane. There are many places there which have been designed to be mimics of the afterlife realms, and there we often meet with loved ones. The whole astral plane feels conscious and aware, not just the afterlife region!
I feel urged to mention that this entire experience we perceive as incarnation is Conscious Awareness and, were we attuned to it, we would indeed experience that everything is imbued with Spirit. Some cultures, and many individuals, are more attuned than others. Caveat; That’s not the same as saying a “body” has independent animation.
Dear Mike, of course you are perfectly right! Everything is composed of consciousness, in the same way that your very real-seeming dream is composed of consciousness. Because nothing else but consciousness objectively exists! But the consciousness that is the stuff of all reality has no identify, no awareness, and no motivating factor. It simply IS.
We will have this discussion quite literally forever!😉