Life Is School for the Soul
A reader asked me: “What if upon reincarnation the person is still a narcissist?” I clarify my thoughts on reincarnation in order to reframe and attempt to answer the question
I entered reincarnation in my image search and chose this conceptual image because the chalkboard evokes a schoolhouse. Shortly after Lindsey’s passing catapulted me back onto my spiritual journey in the passing lane on the Autobahn driving a manual-transmission (stick-shift with a racing clutch, not the paddle-shifting crap that has Enzo Ferrari rolling his eyes from Heaven), vintage Porche 911 Targa,
a car I have loved since I would devour every issue of Road & Track and Car and Driver magazines as a pimply-faced and teased young teenager, I asked my higher power, through my channeler Ane, to enhance my then limited understanding of what we humans have labeled the “soul contract,” gleaned many years before in a conversation with Spiritdecoder.
The Meaning of Life
It dawned on me one night many months ago how screwed up the story is of the Garden of Eden, or I should say, how the interpretations of the allegory are wrong and have led to so much that has been and continues to be wrong in this world. It occurred to me that the so-called “original sin” is quite the opposite. It is curiosity; it is a thirst for knowledge not just of things, but of what is the best way to handle life, which some idiots turned into right vs wrong and good vs. evil. Then it occurred to me that the tree of knowledge is Earth and the tree of life is Heaven. Then I googled and the Kabballah is the closest to my thought as it has the tree of life as “the tree of souls.” In other words, the decision that Adam and Eve made to eat from the tree of knowledge is actually the decision that all souls can make to decide to reincarnate, which is discussed below in the section “Soul Contracts by Rama.”
Soul Contracts by Meredith aka Spiritdecoder
In July 2012 I had arrived at a very fine 12-step-based rehab not only seeking relief from my need to self-medicate, but also hoping to find an understanding of God that meshed with my conception at the time. After hearing her lecture on topics like the Mayan calendar and crystals and other metaphysical tools, I sought out counseling from a member of the spiritual staff whom I referred to as Mystical Meredith. I explained to her that I had bounced around between agnosticism and the belief that God was akin to the Force from Star Wars — which in my view referred to the psychic energy emitted by all living things — and that I believed that some people had the ability to tap into this energy, psychics, and to a lesser extent, me and others who experience the phenomenon of deja vu. I told Meredith that I believed in the existence of souls because I had spoken to the souls of dearly departed through a psychic, and I asked her how God fits into this — asking her if there was a hierarchy of souls with God at the top?
Before answering me, Meredith asked me why I thought I used substances abusively. I answered that I thought there was an irreconcilable conflict between my conscious and subconscious minds over things I had done, or not done, over the past few years, and I drank and drugged to run away from rather than resolve this conflict.
Meredith explained that the conflict was not between my conscious and subconscious, but between my mind and my soul. Meredith’s conception of God, or the Great All (the moniker that resonates with her), and how we and our souls fit in, is that when our souls leave the Great All to become human we contract with the universe to experience certain painful things on Earth that are not spiritual so we can learn what is spiritual (love, kindness, compassion, charity, etc.). [1]
Soul Contracts by Rama
Now here is my higher power’s clarifying explanation, which includes reincarnation. The following is the verbatim conversation except for minor non-substantive edits, and the bracketed words are mine:
“Q: How many levels are there in heaven?
A: It is not so much levels, but rather, cycles. As one starts their journey from soul to soul with a body [and back again, and so on and so on], you generally have easy lives. When you return to source/heaven/god after every lifetime, you will be given a choice to stay in that realm that you are put in or to go back to the master class [Earth]to attain a higher level. You can make the decision to return to the master class at any time. If you choose to go back to earth, it. would be for the specific requirement to have the goal of growing your soul to get to the next level, only you are not consciously aware of it once you incarnate.
Once you enter and complete a few lifetimes you will start to feel comfortable knowing where you want to ascend and with whom. That is where your community of spirits comes into play. We always come in with the same people/souls, lifetime after lifetime. There are about 80 to 120 of us together at any given lifetime. It is around this time where you the soul and collectively the community of spirits start to decide what level they want to attain and what price it will cost them on earth. [No pain, no gain]. Now you can understand that not everyone wants to attain nirvana as you say.
To attain nirvana, you would go on a completely different cycle, and that usually happens after a vast number of lifetimes lived. The lifetimes that you start to choose to live [at that point] are with great suffering. Think of the severely retarded, the severely mentally ill, POWs, people who have died violently at the hands of great evil and even stillborns who give up their life experience for the host.
[This is why bad things happen to good people. Kushner sold a lot of inaccurate books.]
These life cycles will continue again and again and if you have lived your life according to our plan, will allow you to go to higher and higher levels. One obtains full enlightenment when there is nothing more for you to suffer — when there is nothing more for you to learn!
Then you would be in the realms with the great archetypes, messengers and guides and archangels. You then would have an awesome burden and responsibility to heal those souls that remain on earth.”
While not widely accepted in the Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam), the concept of the lifecycle and reincarnation as described to and by me is very similar to Hindu and Buddhist teachings. See also these two posts.
So, at the macro level, the meaning of life is to learn — for the soul to learn how to make a human act like a better human. This oft-quoted line correctly states:
“We are not human beings having a spiritual experience; we are spiritual beings having a human experience.” — Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
I am advised that there is one immutable condition in every contract — the date of death. The how is very much the product of free will.
I prefer my term — “Lifecycle Improv Scripts”
I view the Lifecycle Improv Scripts as Larry David’s show, Curb Your Enthusiasm, on steroids — imagine 100 writers drafting a lifetime worth of improvisational scripts and the negotiations and debates as to who gets to play what roles in each other’s lives… White Feather wrote a brilliant short piece on this, which I cannot find in his vast portfolio. I hope he sees this story and provides us with the link. [Edit — I haven’t found that story yet, but I happened upon this one about the ontological nature of time as it relates to “past lives.”]
[09/25/2022 Edit: Eureka!! I came across the White Feather story today while reading an old essay of mine — he had dropped a link to his story in my story. White Feather’s essay, Forgotten Selves, And the dramas we act out together, starts off with:
What if every single person you meet in your life you’ve met before in other lives? Imagine that for a moment just for fun. No one is a stranger. Everyone is a soul-mate acting out every conceivable sort of relationship.
It is like taking two actors and putting them on a stage then giving them a few hundred different plays to act out together. In one play actor A is a father and actor B is a daughter. In another play actor A is a soldier and actor B is also a soldier who happens to kill actor A. In another play actors A and B fall in love and have seven kids. In another play, actors A and B never meet until right before they die. In yet another play actor A is a wife who is beaten by her husband who happens to be actor B. In still another life actors A and B end up being a songwriting team as well as gay lovers who write several Broadway musicals together. Then there is the life A and B lived together in the jungles of Sumatra. It was primitive times and A and B were hunting together. A slipped on a steep ledge on the side of a mountain and breaks his leg. B is afraid to climb down to save A and he leaves A to die.
Later he writes:
So if there is someone in our lives who appears to be an enemy, they may have been our lover in another play (life). And our lover may have been our slave master or murderer in another life (play). If someone trusts us completely they may have betrayed us in another life and those who betray us may very well have been betrayed by us before.
End of 9/25/2022 edit]
I love the irony of this oft-quoted and misunderstood saying:
“Man Plans, and God Laughs.”
This statement is used to diminish the role that free-will has upon our lives — that we cannot defeat the universe’s scripts. The irony is that while our higher powers have to approve our scripts/outlines, we wrote them. I wonder what goes on in the Executive Producer’s lounge as Zoroaster and Vishnu and Shiva and Rama and Kali and Kama and the rest of the heads of our tribes negotiate the interplay of their charges’ life spans.
I think Steinbeck said it better in Of Mice and Men,
“The best-laid plans of mice and men oft go astray”
which to give credit where credit is due, which is more than I can say for the esteemed Eckhart Tolle and others who profit off the ideas of others [2], John paraphrased from Robert Burns’ poem, To a Mouse.
Saul Levine, M.D., discusses these concepts very well in an article he penned for Psychology Today:
“Mann Tracht, Un Gott Lacht” is an old Yiddish adage meaning, “Man Plans, and God Laughs.” Despite our most careful planning, the Road of Life is unpredictable. We might have driving and destination strategies but scenic new vistas might beckon us or unforeseen roadblocks can deter us.
Our best-laid plans in life can be upended by unexpected changes, which could be either disappointing or exhilarating. Personal or other setbacks, losses of loved ones, illnesses or accidents, broken hearts or tortured souls, are not uncommon occurrences in our lives. On the other hand, fate can provide unanticipated good fortune or heartening experiences.
Sidebar
I also love the irony that New Testament beating, Lord’s Prayer reciting demeaning deacons of AA have a saying of Yiddish origin hanging in their basement meeting rooms of shame.
Back to Dr. Levine’s Article
As Rudyard Kipling put it beautifully in his poem “If.”
“If you can meet with triumph and disaster and treat those two imposters just the same…You are a better man than most.”
Downturns are not permanent defeats, and successes are not ultimate triumphs. How we face our setbacks, with resilience, and accept our successes, with grace, are important measures of our worth as individuals.
Synchronicity drew my attention to this concluding section of Dr. Levine’s article. His quoting of the Kipling classic caught my eye because my brother-in-law spoke eloquently about it in his speech at my niece and nephew’s b’nai mitzvah in March 2019. I have now asked my sister to send me the speech, but, I think I will not wait for Scott’s pearls of wisdom and parse more passages from the poem for you myself.
If you can keep your head when all about you Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;
Do not get defensive
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you, But make allowance for their doubting too;
Confidence as opposed to arrogance
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Patience is a virtue
Or, being lied about, don’t deal in lies, Or, being hated, don’t give way to hating,
Two wrongs do not make a right
And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise;
Practice humility
If you can dream — and not make dreams your master; If you can think — and not make thoughts your aim;
Have aspirations but not projections. I seek contentment, which is not settling but a hopefully high-altitude baseline, coming from within and connection to without. It doesn’t stem from the acquisition of attachments but awareness of connection to the world and the universe as a living, breathing, and heart-beating organism and from alignment of mind and soul and discerning my why — my drive — from discovering who I am at my core.
If you can meet with triumph and disaster And treat those two impostors just the same;
Live life on life’s terms. How we react to things is more important than success or failure, each of which is just an opportunity to learn a life-lesson.
Malignant Narcissists | Hell-on-Earth | The Throwaway Life
When a soul so completely screws up its previous lifecycle its penance is to come back to earth for the sole purpose of living the entire lifecycle in agony. My father’s soul needed to live a throw-away life to pay whatever karmic debt he previously amassed, and I needed a torturer for this lifecycle’s lesson-plan, so we were a match made in heaven.
Rather than do the best he could by me given his narcissism, my father purposely sought to psychologically bury me due to his borderline-personality-fear-of-abandonment, which manifests as perverse jealousy of the love between me and my mother (see Darlene Lancer’s story The Bane of Sons of Narcissistic Fathers).
How is being given free rein to be a diabolical asshole punishment? It is widely accepted that to varying degrees narcissists lack empathy. Empathy is one way in which a soul can communicate with the consciousness in which it has incarnated. By incarnating in a person devoid of empathy, the soul has no control over the human. The soul’s punishment is to live an entire lifecycle watching itself live without an ounce of spirituality and with no ability to do anything about it. The soul has a conscience, so as one bad act after another is committed by its human, the agony builds and builds waiting for death to release it. Hell on earth.
This realization brought me back to a text-versation I had with my father late this past Spring about a month before I permanently broke off relations with him (and pretty much lost my codependent-on-him-mother in the process), wherein I was doing the worst one can do to a narcissist — relentlessly exposing him. He kept denying and digging his heels in deeper and then, for a moment, I read the energy of an entirely different entity. This entity calmly and with sadness asked me to leave him alone. I realized at that moment that my torture had lead to the momentary emergence of my dad’s soul, pleading with me to stop. I did, and his soul retreated to his prison inside the subconscious of a monster.
So, canceling my father was an unintended act of spiritual kindness on my part, as by completely cutting the cord, at least his soul no longer has to witness me being tortured and has the solace of knowing that I now stand as a man, tall on my own two feet. Life-lesson’s mission accomplished. Thank you, Bob (the generic name that my channeler Ane chose a few weeks ago my father’s soul).
Answering Spyder’s Question
The question was what if after having lived a throwaway life the “person comes back and is still a narcissist?” First, let me clarify that as I understand it, the person does not come back. The soul reincarnates as an entirely different DNA-blueprinted-animus, and as touched on above our roles flip all over the spectrum as is needed for our soul’s lesson-plan and the lesson-plans of the souls in our community.
For example, in the early 1700’s I was a black male slave. [3]
As black slaves in the Caribbean in the early 18th century (1700’s), Sitara (Lindsey’s soul’s name) and I were friends since childhood and lovers when opportunity allowed, which on the Caribbean cane plantation were few and far between, especially since the man with the whip and side-arm fancied and impregnated her.
I died at his hands not because I was a black slave — I died because I could not control my jealousy nor my pride. Had I managed to endure the indignities with humility, and not acted selfishly in the guise of standing up for others, Sitara would not have had to see my dead body lying murdered in the surf. My personality defects, my “male ego,” not the color of my skin, got me killed. Obviously, my black skin placed me in harm’s way but I and only I proximately caused my demise in that manner.
I do not have either jealous or barely sinfully prideful bones in my body because my soul learned the appropriate life lessons in previous incarnations.
My subsequent incarnations in that lifecycle line
In a lifecycle that spanned the very late 18th century and a good part of the first half of the 19th century, I incarnated as a white male who became a slave trader. My name may have been Conroy. Apparently, I had a direct supply line from Africa, which I understand took acts of brazen piracy as most of the world was turning against slavery. That isn’t even the spiritually bad part — it was part of those times and somebody had to play those roles. Even bad roles can be played with spirituality, but I became very greedy and conducted shady business dishonorably, swindled a family member, who in turn murdered me.
As a result of that poorly lead lifecycle, I returned to Earth as a female African captured young and separated from my mother, Sitara’s incarnation, and in Virginia, known as Sassy, endured beatings and sexual assaults that left me disfigured, but I survived on guile and learned how to cook the best bread and cakes and while acting like what has become known as and disparaged as an “Uncle Tom,” helped many of my brethren. So, I learned from the mistakes of both of those previous incarnations.
Reframing and Answering the Question
The better question is not what if, but why? Why would a soul need to live consecutive throw-away lives? I can surmise that upon return to heaven and analysis of the life lived trapped in the mind of a narcissist that it’s determined that the soul did not learn the error of its previous ways or possibly did not fulfill its contract of penance. I can surmise that the soul elected to permit the animus to commit suicide, for example. The only thing I know for sure is that if a soul incarnates as another narcissist, that is a role needed to be filled in the lesson plans of others.
Sitara and Marcus
Let's conclude this article on a spiritually positive note as I share with you my understanding of the concept of soulmates and heaven mates. As I noted at the outset through the hyperlink tied to Lindsey’s name, yesterday marked one year since her passing. I was born into this lifecycle as Greg Maidman. I learned through my spiritual awakening catalyzed by Lindsey’s death, that I, Marcus, and Sitara are heaven mates.
Now, love between souls a contract made in heaven unconditional Vows made there are not broken Heavenmates are eternal
I describe this in detail in this story I wrote yesterday.
Essentially, souls that have this love for each other enter into contracts with each other that define their expectations of each other / required contributions to the relationship, including their shared workload they carry in Heaven for the benefit of those on Earth. Laxaa writes in
We live in glorious community in Heaven. We do not sit around all day in chunky diapers, playing harps and floating on clouds. Don’t be disappointed. Those diapers don’t flatter anyone’s thighs anyway.
In Heaven we work. In Heaven we create. In Heaven we serve a Love that is beyond anything which our human brains can fathom.
Heaven is also organized and orderly; think Marie Kondo on steroids. There are levels, layers and “neighborhoods.”
What we do on earth, what we learn and how grow, affects what responsibilities we are given in Heaven.
In each lifetime, Marcus and Sitara have contracted to be lovers of the karmic soulmate variety. Never have we contracted for the happily ever after with each other. The purpose of a karmic soulmate relationship on Earth is to bring healing to one another.
Leading up to yesterday I could barely sleep and expected an emotionally grueling day. I arrived at the cemetery to spend time with Linsdey around 12:30 and stayed for four glorious hours. The sun was shining, there was not a cloud in the sky, I brought a tuna salad sandwich and a few cold cold ones so Sitara could enjoy them through me, and just laid peacefully on the ground communing telepathically, even sleeping a bit. I wrote this tanka on my walk home:
Prone all day with you Bathing cemetery sun Cry arrive cry left Twixt telepathy lovers like Sunday under covers
Why did we script lives wherein Lindsey would meet the love of her life near the end of hers and I would have to live with the loss? As I understand Lindsey’s life before me, she made choices based on not understanding or trusting the concept of love, and she is reaping the benefits now of our love in her life review that will benefit her future incarnations:
Unconditional Love — Eros and Agape I gave and you learned You gave me the greatest gift Love from a beautiful soul
For me, Lindsey's death provided the catalyst and opportunity for my spiritual awakening and I am determined that her sacrifice not be in vain and thus am dedicated to continued soul expansion.
That I woke up this morning and wrote this article I attribute to the time I spent communing in the cemetery yesterday.
I sign off now with an unbroken line tanka I wrote to our eternal love:
Tankas honoring both Lindsey and Sitara, who are one and the same with Eternal Love of Marcus, Greg, Greg from Marcus
Notes:
- I had asked Meredith to recommend reading to aid my understanding of our discussion. She recommended, as do I, a) Conversations with God, Book 1 and b) Comprehending Coincidence. The latter I discuss in What is “ChannSpirations and Coincidences?” A Celebration of Synchronicities and the Every-Person-Portal. This article results from a channspiration.
2. See my story Credit Where Credit Is Due Part Deux, Count Eckhart Tolle along with Tolstoy as an idea thief
3. I do not have memories of my past lives. I do intuit that I have experienced certain things, have asked my spirit guides and Rama questions, and the facts that I shared here are what they have revealed to me.
