Past Lives

by Ross Bishop

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When you look into the face of a child the first thing you see is innocence. But if you look deeper, you will see more. Although we are often not aware of it, each of us carries the memories and unresolved pain of our previous incarnations.

Let’s look at your situation: You came to Earth to resolve the issues that interfere with the acceptance of your eternal self. That interference surfaces as a set of beliefs that block your ability to hold compassion, especially toward yourself. When you are unable to hold compassion, you must live from your ego.

Living from the ego is guaranteed to create problems both for you and with the various people in your life. You make unspoken agreements with these people to mutually withhold unconditional love, but that does not blunt the pain and inner emptiness you end up feeling. It is through these feelings and the conflicts they create that The Universe tries to make you aware of your false beliefs and the behaviors they generate. If you recall from the previous article, we looked at how those are created. When you don’t respond with compassion to life, The Universe finds ways to ramp up the intensity of your experience, encouraging you more forcefully to look at what you are doing.

If your conflicts are significant and unresolved when you pass from this life, the imprint of those unresolved experiences travel with you. This makes you more sensitive to this kind of problem when it reoccurs, in your next life and it will. You weren’t able to finish your learning in the previous situation, so The Universe gives you additional opportunities to work through your issues and learn compassion.

Carrying pain from one lifetime to another is known as Karma, and it is often misunderstood. Karma is not about guilt or punishment. You are not punished in the future for your past behavior. Rather, The Universe takes what you haven’t learned about living from compassion from one lifetime to shape the events of your next life to better focus your efforts. So, there is a “carry forward,” but it’s not punishment. It is to encourage you to learn so that you will not have to keep repeating the same cycle. And, this will continue until you are able to fully live in what I call “The God Space” (the place of complete compassion).

If you recall from the previous article, because you have free will, The Universe can only encourage you to find the truth for yourself. So in that context, let’s look at how karma works:

Pretend it’s the year 1650, and you live in the forest near a village somewhere in Europe. You are a student of herbal healing. You grow herbs and people from the nearby villages come to you for help.

Your heart’s basically in the right place, but you also feel an undercurrent of self-doubt. You do good work, but the gratitude of the people starts to affect the hurt little girl inside who never felt really loved or appreciated. You develop false pride and an attitude.

The local priests hear of your work and become suspicious. In the first place, churches don’t like competition and secondly, Church doctrine at the time is to urge people to accept their afflictions as punishment from God for their sins. You, on the other hand, offer healing as God’s gift through nature.

The priests urge the people to find greater faith to deal with their afflictions and denounce herbal healing as suspect. Wounded by the criticism, you speak out in your defense. Unfortunately, even though your cause is just, you are also driven by wounded pride.

There is confrontation, positions harden and the situation escalates. The result is condemnation, torture to gain a confession, a trial for witchcraft and finally a burning at the stake. At the end you are wondering where God has been, since you feel wrongly persecuted, and do not feel that you have done anything wrong. . .

Yes, the priests were wrong, but this isn’t about them. The priests have their own learning from this experience, and you are helping them with that, but  for you, this affair was created to help you see what happens to you when you feel powerless, unlovable and helpless. You will carry the issues, the beliefs and the fears underlying these unresolved issues into your subsequent lives. And these forces will determine the events of those lives so that you will have the opportunity to resolve your false beliefs and your ego vulnerabilities.

So today, three centuries later, what happens? First, the events of your childhood will amplify the issues you brought in around the misuse of power and your feelings of powerlessness and victimization. Your parents may be authoritarian or demanding, for example. However it plays out, you will get set up to react strongly around those issues. The Universe will continue to create life experiences until you see through the futility of living from your ego. No matter how long it takes, you must eventually grow frustrated with the conflict and turmoil that gains you absolutely nothing.

Eventually you will grow weary of the stress and conflict and begin to search for alternatives. It is then that you begin to disassemble the beliefs that drive your ego. And when that happens, real healing can occur. Eventually you will see through your fear and accept the truth about yourself. The power of the process is that you come to the truth on your own. Doing it yourself makes the truth unshakable. Incidentally, along the way, you may also become angry with God. It is a difficult process and it feels unfair a lot of the time.

This is an experiential process. You cannot learn it from books. Books and teachers can help show you the way, but the learning comes from what you do – from your life experiences and how you respond to them.

You can wait for life to bounce you around until you are forced to make the transition or, if you want to advance your development and sidestep a lot of the pain, you can learn to work with, not against, the issues that life presents. The shamanic journey process was developed many centuries ago and has established itself as the most effective way to accomplish this exploration. You can also use the journey process to also travel back to your troubling past lives and work with what happened back then.

I have written extensively about the shamanic journey process and how to use it in both Healing The Shadow and in my most recent book Journey to Enlightenment. I have also recorded a guided version of the shamanic journey process on CD. These are all available in the Books & CDs section of this website.m

 

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