Choosing Lives During the Interlife

(extract from chapter 6 of The Book of the Soul)

© Ian Lawton 2004

Newton’s subjects report that after any initial planning discussions their guide will have some sort of behind-the-scenes communication with ‘coordinators’ who set up a session in the ‘place of life selection’ – which they compare to a giant movie theater with screens all around. Here souls are able to review the various options available to them in terms of a selection of human beings that will be incarnate with more or less the right sort of aptitudes, circumstances and environment, at about the right time, perhaps in a number of geographic locations. So effectively this place is one where the subject can manipulate time and control the movie telepathically as if it were a video playback, fast-forwarding where necessary and even pausing the scene to enter it temporarily and gain direct experience of that particular incarnation. The formative period between the ages of about eight to twenty is most regularly viewed, but major events after that may also be seen. This is how one subject describes the experience in some detail:

Continue to report everything. What do you see next?

The ring is surrounded by banks of screens – I am looking at them.

Screens on walls?

They appear as walls themselves, but nothing is really solid… it’s all… elastic… the screens curve around me… moving.

Tell me more about the screens.

They are blank… not reflecting anything yet… they shimmer as sheets of glass… mirrors.

What happens next?

I feel a moment of quietness – it’s always like this – then it’s as if someone flipped a switch on the projector in a panoramic movie theater. The screen comes alive with images and there is color… action… full of light and sound.

Keep reporting to me. Where is your soul in relation to the screens?

I am hovering in the middle, watching the panorama of life all around me… places… people… I know this city!

What do you see?

New York.

Did you ask to see New York City?

We talked about my going back there. Gee – it’s changed – more buildings… and the cars… it’s as noisy as ever.

I’ll come back to New York in a minute. Right now I want you to tell me what is expected of you in the ring.

I’m going to mentally operate the panel.

What’s that?

A scanning device in front of the screens. I see it as a mass of lights and buttons. It’s as if I’m in the cockpit of an airplane…. I know it sounds crazy but this is what is coming through to me so I can explain to you what I am doing…. I will help the controllers change the images on the screens by operating the scanner with my mind.

Oh, you are going to operate the projector as if you were working in a movie theater?

[Laughs] Not the projector, the scanner. Anyway, they aren’t really movies. I am watching life actually going on in the streets of New York. My mind connects with the scanner to control the movement of the scenes I am watching….

Position yourself at the panel and become the operator while continuing to explain everything to me.

I have assumed control. I see… lines converging along various points in a series of scenes… I’m traveling through time now on the lines and watching the images on the screens change.

And the scenes are constantly moving around you?

Yes, then the points light up on the lines when I want the scene to stop.

Why are you doing all this?

I’m scanning. The stops are major turning points on life’s pathways involving important decisions… possibilities… events which make it necessary to consider alternate choices in time….

Do you create the scenes of life while you track?

Oh no! I simply control their movement through time on the lines…. The lines of energy are… roads with points of colored light as guideposts which I can move forward, backward, or stop.

As if you were running a video tape with start, fast-forward, stop and rewind buttons?

[Laughs] That’s the idea.

All right, you are moving along the track, scanning scenes and you decide to stop. Tell me what you do then.

I suspend the scene on the screens so I can enter it.

What? Are you saying you become part of the scene yourself?

Yes, now I have direct access to the action.

In what way? Do you become a person in the scene, or does your soul hover overhead while people move around?

Both. I can experience what life is like with anyone in the scene, or just watch them from any vantage point.

Now this raises some interesting questions, because at first sight it might appear that once we have made our life choice everything else is predetermined. This idea is reinforced by this subject referring to the place of life selection as the ‘ring of destiny’. However, nothing could be further from the truth, and in fact what they appear to see are merely snippets of a number of major probabilities on the primary timeline of each future life of their potential incarnations, combined with some less likely or indeed beneficial alternatives based on different choices that might be made, which are then additional possibilities for each life. Apparently, though, these alternatives are not unlimited, because after a certain point adding choices does not productively enhance the potential for us to learn lessons. The overall emphasis is that incarnate life involves personal responsibility for karmic choice in a climate of free will. This is how Newton himself describes the planning process:

As they view specific scenes of what the Timemasters want them to see, some souls feel they are playing a chess game where they don’t yet know all the possible moves available for a desired ending. Usually, souls look at parts of a future life on a base line, or ring line, as some clients call it. The ring line represents the greatest probable course of a life for each body examined. The soul preparing for incarnation knows that one chess move, one minute change in the game they are watching, could alter the outcome. I find it intriguing that most of the time souls are not shown any in-depth probable future outcomes. They know there are many other possible moves on the chessboard of life which can change at any moment of play. Frankly, this is what makes the game interesting for most souls. Changes in life are conditional on our free will toward a certain action. This causality is part of the laws of karma. Karma is opportunity but it also involves fortitude and endurance because the game will bring setbacks and losses along with personal victories.

Newton provides a prime example of this with a subject whose previous life had been cut short aged sixteen when, on the spur of the moment and in a quest for adventure, he volunteered as a Union messenger for the Battle of Gettysburg in 1863. He had no chance to say goodbye to anyone, and was killed in action the next day. When he returned to his soul group after death, that portion of his young sweetheart’s soul energy that remained in the ethereal realms cried out: ‘Why are you back here? We were supposed to be married!’ He immediately realized this was a totally unforeseen action in his life plan, indicating the extent to which we can exercise free will.

The previous subject goes on to discuss his various next-life choices in some detail. He had requested that he be allowed to train as a classical pianist, because his musical interests were thwarted by an early death and lack of financial opportunity in his previous life in New York. He was also allowed to look at similar possible lives in Los Angeles, Buenos Aires and Oslo. In all these places he watched the students practicing in various musical academies, even making brief contact with their minds to experience their thoughts and feelings. He was particularly studying them in 1956 when they were in their teens, which in earth time meant that he was fast-forwarding from some time just before his birth in 1937. In this case, he did actually choose to return to the same city:

I want New York.

Do you think you have looked at the other cities carefully enough?

[Impatiently] Yes, I did that, but I don’t want them.

Wait a minute. What if you liked a music student in Oslo, but wanted to live in New York City?

[Laughs] As a matter of fact, there is a promising girl in Los Angeles, but I still want New York.

All right, move forward. As your time in the ring draws to a close, give me the details of your probable life selection.

I am going to New York to be a musician. I’m still trying to make up my mind between a couple of people, but I think I will choose [stops to laugh] a dumpy kid with a lot of talent. His body won’t have the stamina of my last one, but I’ll have the advantage of parents with some money who will encourage me to practice, practice, practice.

Money is important?

I know I sound… grasping… selfish… but there was no money in my last life. If I want to express the beauty of music and give pleasure to myself and others, I need proper training and supportive parents, otherwise I’ll get sidetracked… I know myself.

We can see that this subject was not only offered a choice of four different cities, but apparently also several options of different students in each of them. This is perhaps rather more than the norm, and certainly in my own example I seemed to have only three life options – albeit rather more contrasting ones. But if this subject’s life planning sounds a little too easy and comfortable, we should remind ourselves that his previous life had been a hard one. By contrast, here is the report of another subject whose previous life was that of a wealthy and pampered Chinese empress – and who also only had three options from which to choose

Of my three choices, two were women and one was a handsome young man who, I was told, ‘was feminine inside’. One woman was very thin, almost frail-looking, who was to live a quiet life of a devoted wife and mother. The other woman was chic, kind of flashy, and destined to be a society gadfly. She was also emotionally cold. I chose the man because I would have to cope with a life of homosexuality. I knew if I could overcome the shame of society it would offset my life of adulation as an empress.

He could have chosen to have more fun as a society girl, but in a life so similar to that of the empress that his karma would have been little advanced. He could have chosen the quiet and devoted wife, which arguably would have been more or less a halfway-house choice in terms of adding to his karmic experience. But instead he chose the hardest option for the swiftest possible karmic progression and balancing. This was his choice, and he makes no suggestion that he was coerced. We will consider hard life choices in far more detail in the next chapter.