BOOK READ: 'Journey of Souls' Thread Part II

[I Have A Dream]

There has been some discussion in reference to continuing the book read discussion so that some other aspects of the book can be critiqued and to allow people who read the book after the official book read dates to also exprss their views.

Please feel free to post any thoughts about 'Journey of Souls' by Michael Newton, PhD. here.

For your information , here's a link to the original book read thread for this book:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=245&topic_id=18569&mesg_id=18569

[I Have A Dream]

1. I'll start. What aspects of this book resonated with you and what parts..

didn't?

Were there any particular things described in the book that were just so different from what you believe that they seemed wrong?

I personally didn't feel that the book contained anything that seemed totally wrong, but I really didn't have any preconceived ideas of what happened after we died except that I felt that it certainly wasn't what most mainstream Christians felt happened. (St. Peter at Heaven's gate, etc.)

[Sanity Claws]

2. New souls are not blank slates

I no longer have the book so I can't find the quote but Newton indicates that new souls are not blank slates. Souls are grouped together with others who are similar and they stay together forever.
Why/how does a new soul have certain inclinations or personality traits?
I have no problem with the concept that a reincarnated soul carries the impressions and lessons from prior lives. But a new soul? Where does it acquire its proclivities?

Another thing is the lack of reference to souls of non-humans. We humans form very close bonds with animals. I frankly think one of my current cats is a reincarnation of one that died in 1990. Nowhere did he mention a human soul meeting an animal soul. Maybe that is just not something he handled or not important to him.

[I Have A Dream]

3. I'm currently reading some material channelled by the Ascended...

Masters, and one of the things that they discuss is that all new souls go through what is described as 7 rays. Many souls choose to stay in the rays and work there. A small percentage decide to incarnate on Earth. Although each soul goes through all of the rays, there's one particular ray that it chose to stay in the longest, and that is the ray that is its permanent ray for as long as it incarnates. I wonder if this is what is meant by not being a blank slate. (i.e., that there are things that the new soul does before it ever incarnates.)

Good question!

I don't recall animals being discussed either. I wonder if one of his other books discussed it. cassiepriam has read all 3 of the books, and I'm sure that she'll be jumping in here at some point. cassie, were animals ever discussed?

[cassiepriam]

4. Yes he did talk about animals in one of the later books.

There is a special spot in heaven for animal spirits and when we pass over we can request that the spirit of a beloved pet be brought to us. There are designated spirit guides who handle all of that. They can find our pet for us in the spirit world.

Also my understanding is that animals do reincarnate and work a path that is specific to the animal kingdom....

Yes I have a dog whom I swear is an incarnation of an earlier pet we had. Even my husband keeps saying it is true, and he doesn't even believe in woo woo stuff!

[cassiepriam]

5. Yes, souls are not blank slates is his contention.

Soul birth is a topic not many have talked about a great deal. It is shrouded in mystery and Newton had a very hard time getting his subjects to talk about it.

Apparently all souls come from the Divine, we are divided off from it somehow. And each soul is like a snowflake, unique and different from every other soul. And God wanted souls to represent the entirety of types so there is a very wide range of soul personalties. As a totality we souls represent the complexities of God. And we come out in similar clusters, soul groupings etc.

I am not sure I am explaining this very well. It has been a long time since I read the other books. Maybe someone else who has read it can jump in. If not I can go back and look up the pertinent parts.

[Sanity Claws]

6. New Souls

Newton says new souls are created. At some point a new soul must be put in a family of souls that are not in his group.
Let me give an example. Every soul must be born to someone. If he is new, then he must be born to someone who has incarnated before and therefore is not in his cluster. (If you say that the new soul is born to another new soul from the same cluster, that just pushes the issue back a generation.) So it appears that a soul must have a significant relationship, certainly ripe for the creation of karmic issues, with someone who is not of his cluster. This new soul may never have contact with the soul from the other cluster with whom he may have karmic issues. Right? How are these issues worked out? Is it possible that those persons who don't have significant bonds with parents are new souls? or just not of the same soul cluster?

[I Have A Dream]

7. I don't really know either, in search of sanity. I had a similar...

question about timing. The link to the post in the original thread is below.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=245&topic_id=18569&mesg_id=19881

I know that time as we know it is really only a reality here on Earth, but I can't get past it. Maybe your question and mine are related.

[cassiepriam]

8. Incarnations and time

I must have missed your question the first time around, I will try to answer it.

Are you asking how is it that you could come back in a future life as the parent of your current life parent? (This all gets confusing doesn't it?’t it :) )

Keep in mind we are talking a long span of time. Each soul incarnates over 1400 times. And that can be over many thousands of years. And the interval between each life can be very long or very short. You could be together 500 yrs ago and then today. The lives are not usually sequential. You may skip lives in between.

But it could be sequential. You could be a parent to your current parent in the next life. Let’s say my parent dies in the year 2006. I die in the year 2020. I reincarnate right away in the year 2021, my parent waits just a bit longer, is born again in the year 2040, when I am old enough to have a child.

The difference in the spirit world of 1 year vs 30 years is negligible.

And you are right about time. I think too we are looking at it from an earth standpoint.

Past, present, and future are supposed to all be happening at the same time. I have heard it said that time is like a merry go round, we can hop on or off anytime we like.

[I Have A Dream]

9. What I meant was how can someone be reviewing a life...

with the parents not yet born? If I'm talking to the people in my soul group who are going to be my parents if I choose to take that life, how can they not already be the parents of that particular child (who is going to be born) on Earth? The parents on Earth already have souls, and I'm getting ready to go into their baby's body.

Does this make sense? (I know that I'm not being very clear, but I don't know how to say it more clearly.)

[rumpel]

10. He also said, that our souls do not entirely leave the LBL dimension

and that it is up to the soul how much of it will be sent down. He was asking the souls, what happens when a percentage of the soul is working on earth, "the soul part (energy) that is left is somewhat dimmed", they said. Depending on the task at hand and how much energy is needed for a particular lifetime they will send that part along. They also never advise a very large part to be used, such as a soul trying to accomplish 2 major tasks in form of parallel lives at once. I thought, ah - so that is where my "higher self" is at.

So, the souls you are talking to may already have a percentage of them working on earth, as the future parents.

Cassie, was it in Journey of Souls or Destiny of Souls? - I get them mixed up.

Also, we have a very hard time visualizing time, but in a book written by a Native American shaman, I found one simple explanation which made some sense to me at the time: we tend to look at time as a horizontal line, try to visualize it in a vertical line.

I have another one on time from a perspective of an astrophysicist, but I need to dig it up from a book - I'll have to do it later

:)

[cassiepriam]

11. OK I think I get it now.... it is confusing isn't it?

A couple of thoughts:

1. I think you are assuming that there is a tighter window during lives between lives. Your soul group could be discussing all of this prior to your parents' birth or even grandparents' birth. The lives between lives state may be 50-100 years, or even longer. Remember soul life has no end. We are talking eternity so what is a couple of hundred years? Some souls take longer to map out their life plan then others, or they have more work to do in the spirit world. There is some thought however that souls are incarnating a bit faster than they have in the past. I have been trying to track this, but not many people have investigated the actual time lines.

2.I think you may be getting bogged down in human linear time thinking. The whole way we look at time is only a human artifact of living on a heavy dense planet with limited dimensions. We see time and space as finite when they are not. Again you might what to think of the merry go round analogy.

3. And also I can not explain this very well, but it is possible that each of us creates our own little reality. If our life is a play so to speak, we may each have our own little theater, and other souls may send energy to play their parts, but they have their own stage somewhere else, working their life plan.

I know it is all confusing, and we are only guessing. The one thing I do know for sure that the truth is going to be more complicated and much more sophisticated then we can even imagine. The version the spirit worlds tells us about is only the Reader's Digest version dumbed down so we can wrap our human brains around it. That is why I was fascinated by Newtons' work, it is the first real glimpse into the inner workings of the spirit world I have found.

The picture I always get in my head is that we are like ants on an ant hill. Most of the ants don't even know that there is a whole human world above them and don't care. The few who do believe that there is something other than ants in the world cannot even beginning to understand the workings of the human world. We are like those ants.