SPIRITUAL MISCELLANEA

Extracts from Chapter 10 of the original Book of the Soul

© Ian Lawton 2004 and 2008

CONTENTS

The Logistics of Reincarnation, and Animal and Extraterrestrial Souls

Incarnations on Other Planets

Evolution by Intelligent Design, and the Human Blueprint

Atlantis and Lemuria, and Incarnation in Pre-Human Form

Levels of Amnesia, and Humanity's Fall from Grace

The Logistics of Reincarnation, and Animal and Extraterrestrial Souls

One additional element of a spiritual worldview that is often raised is that of logistics. In particular, what is the source of souls when we have such a rapidly expanding human population on the planet? One solution might be that less experienced souls that have incarnated previously as various types of animal could be promoted up the ranks, and this idea is found in most eastern philosophies. However, Michael Newton’s subjects seem unanimous that this is not how the logistics of soul progression work. They strongly assert that there are different types of soul, which are created as required for the various broad categories of life such as plants, animals and humans.

One of Newton’s relatively experienced subjects specifically reports on how new human souls are born as individual identities from a swirling mass of pure soul energy, and how in the interlife she, as a specialist ‘incubator mother’ in training, nurses and protects them. Shakuntala Modi seems to have confirmed this idea by regressing certain of her subjects right back to the birth of their soul, finding that there were only human incarnations thereafter. Indeed, it has been implicitly supported by a number of esoteric commentators for some decades, inasmuch as they insist that other animal species do not have individual souls as such, but rather a ‘group soul’. Newton’s subjects partly confirm this idea but seem to suggest that there is both a group and an individual aspect to animal souls – the main difference from their human counterparts being that their soul energy has a different, somewhat simpler constitution, with a far lesser sense of ego or identity.

By contrast, Morris Netherton appears to have regressed a number of patients into animal lives that preceded their human ones, and Dolores Cannon also supports this idea. One of her subjects argues that although animals do have group souls, which is where much of their herd instinct and group telepathy comes from, some of them can break free and become more consciously individualized via human love or other human interactions, which then allows them to evolve into a human soul. In fact this same subject supports the idea that all souls have to go through the mineral, plant and animal stages before reaching human status; and in this soul evolution model the subject also includes the basic collective energy forms of elemental spirits that relate to particular places, and of nature spirits that protect particular species of plant or animal, even though these are clearly not physical forms as such.

Hans TenDam straddles these two positions by splitting souls into different ‘evolutionary families’ according to the experiences they had before they began incarnating on earth, something which he argues has great significance for the therapist because of its bearing on the types of psychological problems they might develop. One family is what he refers to as ‘starter souls’ who had no other incarnatory experiences before, whether in physical or nonphysical form, and who were clearly created from scratch to incarnate as humans on earth. But another family evolved from animals, and he echoes Cannon’s sentiment regarding human interaction making subsequent human incarnation more likely – while at the same time providing fascinating evidence of the group nature of animal souls from research conducted in the late nineteenth century by AF Knudsen into hypnosis with horses. And another family primarily involves souls that evolved from a whole plethora of different elementals or nature spirits, some of which seem to incarnate as humans as a result of inadvertently possessing one originally – which ties in with Cannon’s subject’s take on possession from the last chapter, even though he does not mention her as a source.

I accept the conceptual validity of the idea that animal or elemental soul energies might split off from their group soul to become more individualized – after all, I accept that the Ultimate Source is the ultimate collective soul from which every form in the universe sprang, whether physical or nonphysical. However, very few of our pioneers’ subjects appear to remember an animal incarnation. Although Newton’s subjects report explicitly that human souls cannot adopt animal forms, Ian Stevenson indicates that children occasionally seem to recall ‘intermediate’ animal lives, while Helen Wambach has had a few subjects who have hinted at a past life as an animal – although it is unclear whether these were between human lives or before them. But even supposedly intermediate animal lives can perhaps be explained by TenDam’s suggestion that souls who do not properly pass into the ethereal realms might allow themselves to become pathologically identified with a particular incarnate animal for a period of time; or by Newton’s subjects’ reports of the ‘space of transformation’ in which they can experience any animal form without genuine incarnation. There is also the possibility of people remembering incarnations as an intelligent life form on another planet, a possibility to which we will return shortly. On top of this, as far as I can tell Cannon’s information comes from one subject only, while the extent to which TenDam is quoting from other sources that are sometimes relatively old and not necessarily reliable, rather than from his own practical experience, is not entirely clear. And I do not necessarily accept his claim that the vast bulk of human souls were originally nonhuman spirits that incarnated in nonphysical form, with only a very few being freshly created human starter or for that matter animal souls – again because the source of these statistics is unclear. By contrast, Newton’s and Modi’s detailed findings seem to derive consistently from a significant number of their own regression subjects – and while the same appears to be true of Netherton, he provides scant details and no case studies to support his claims.

On that basis, I do not discount the possibility that in rare cases the soul energy of an animal, or of an elemental or nature spirit, might become sufficiently individualized to evolve into human form. Nor do I discount the possibility that in a more general sense these collective soul energies might be allowed the opportunity to evolve by somehow being recycled into human soul energy sources as part of a grand plan, although even if this were the case I cannot conceive that there could be any continuity of individual identity. However, I am inclined to side more with Newton’s and Modi’s testimony that, as a general rule, human souls do not progress through the animal or any other ranks, but are instead created afresh. It is also worth noting that, if animal souls are predominantly collectivized, my rejection in chapter 7 of the idea that human souls can be punished by devolution or reversion to animal form is arguably strengthened.

From a logistics perspective I would therefore argue that we can assume there is a sufficient stock of human souls that can be created afresh if need be to match any increase in population on earth. But this is only part of the story because, even if we ignore the rare occurrence of experienced souls choosing to lead parallel lives, another factor that influences soul availability is the speed with which souls return into incarnation. A number of our pioneers have attempted to produce statistics on intervals between incarnations. For example, the shortest duration Joel Whitton had come across was ten months, while the longest was over eight hundred years, with an average of about forty years – although he suggests that this average has been coming down in the last few centuries, coincident with the increase in world population. Peter Ramster is even more insistent about this steady decrease in interval duration, suggesting that in the distant past lives might be separated by anything from one hundred to a thousand years, while more recently the gaps reduce to between one and thirty years. Bruce Goldberg agrees with this, suggesting that his patients had centuries between incarnations in the middle ages, about seventy-five years in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and as little as between one and twenty-five years in the twentieth century. Meanwhile Stevenson reports that most of his child cases reincarnated within less than three years, with an average of fifteen months – but we must remember that these are special cases that we have strong reason to suspect have no interlife proper, so they are not representative of the population as a whole.

But even these attempts at averages are to some extent invalidated because they fail to take account of further complicating factors. For example, a number of our pioneers explicitly state that more experienced souls tend to incarnate less frequently – because they are taking on increasing responsibilities in the ethereal realms. So it might easily be that average intervals between incarnations have reduced recently precisely because more immature souls are incarnating to satisfy population demands, rather than because the same stock of souls is coming back more regularly. On the other hand, Whitton argues that the world is now changing so fast that souls can come back more frequently and still have different experiences, on which basis he argues that it may be existing souls who are driving the population explosion, and not vice versa. And one of Cannon’s subjects even goes as far as to suggest that there is a huge surplus of souls that have already been created, creating general competition for bodies to incarnate into – although, as we will see shortly, this suggestion is complicated by the fact that earth is not the only possible destination.

The only way to have a degree more certainty about this issue would be to collate statistics about intervals between incarnations for individual subjects stretching right back to their earliest incarnations, to see if they showed a marked decrease for each individual – despite the fact that they should, on the face of it and all other things being equal, be increasing as that soul becomes more experienced. It is difficult to establish the extent to which Whitton, Ramster and Goldberg have attempted to do this. From Newton’s description of studying the ‘incarnation chronology of a client’ it appears he may have paid more attention to this issue, and he still reports the same trends. He indicates that individual subjects regressing as far back as the nomadic cultures of the Paleolithic had intervals between incarnations of hundreds or even thousands of years, which reduced to about five hundred years on average by the time that regular settled agriculture had been introduced in the Neolithic. By the middle ages the same subjects were experiencing one life every two centuries, by the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries about one life per century, and by the twentieth century more than one life per century was common.

But even then, as Newton and Ramster admit, it might be that some less interesting past lives from more distant ages are simply not recalled, or that our general past-life recall abilities fade over time – either of which would mean that these statistics would not contain all the base data in the first place. Nevertheless, it seems to me that they are sufficiently consistent that they do strongly suggest that average intervals between incarnations are reducing significantly for all of us as individual souls, century by century. This does seem to go against the grain of everything we have learned about soul advancement, and none of our pioneers really comments on this rather disturbing discrepancy. There is one rather morbid interpretation, which is that our increasing hunger for the experiences of the material world is blinding us to the spiritual truths we once knew, and causing many souls who were on an upward path to regress somewhat. This would coincide with my general view about humanity becoming increasingly divorced from its spiritual roots. And this argument is not invalidated by suggestions that the physical population explosion is forcing us to return more regularly, precisely because there is supposedly an unlimited supply of new human souls.

On the other hand, as has been repeatedly stressed by our pioneers’ subjects, it may be that it is completely wrong to think of the interlife in terms of earth-time duration, and that the quality of the experience is far more important than the apparent quantity. But, if that is the case, we must still ask why already reasonably experienced souls appear to be accelerating their experiences of the physical world, rather than letting new souls take the population strain. Perhaps Whitton is right, and the pace of cultural change does now allow us to pack far more rewarding lives into a more condensed time frame, thus accelerating our group learning curve – at least in the developed world, which is by definition what all of our pioneers’ subjects tend to inhabit at least in their current incarnation. But this argument fails to take account of the unavoidable fact that most of the population explosion is occurring in parts of the world where, arguably, conditions of deprivation make these lives far less tolerable, let alone varied, than they have ever been. Regression therapy is, of course, rarely used in places where people are just struggling to survive. So we have no idea whether these souls are experienced and have deliberately chosen such lives, or are predominantly new souls faced by some of the severest of tests. But, in any case, Newton’s subjects also report that the population explosion risks severe damage to our planet, a viewpoint that common sense alone tends to support. So, ultimately, the question of the underlying reason for the general pattern of accelerating incarnations is one to which I feel unable to provide a definitive answer.

Incarnations on Other Planets

I have already made a number of brief references to intelligent life on other planets. In an earlier chapter I briefly mentioned Newton’s subjects’ reports of how souls undergoing interlife training as specialist explorers, designers, harmonizers and ethicists visit the intermediate realms of other planets without incarnating on them, and it is clear that some of these are very much like earth. And in the hypnotic progressions we discussed in chapter 8 we regularly encountered the assumption that we will not only be colonizing other planets in the future – some being outside of our own solar system with atmospheres similar to that of earth – but will also be in touch with intelligent extraterrestrials that come from such planets.

I would like to think that most open-minded people realize that the statistical likelihood of us occupying the only planet in the entire universe able to sustain complex life forms is about as close to zero as you can get. Increasingly sophisticated space telescopes now allow astronomers to study other solar systems that appear to show signs of orbiting planets, and the only issue of contention that remains is whether or not more advanced extraterrestrials have actually visited earth and made contact. This is not an issue on which I am prepared to make a definitive statement, mainly because I have not conducted anywhere near enough research into an area that is a veritable minefield of claim and counterclaim, and which is so beset with the politics of conspiracy theory. All I will say is that I support those researchers who increasingly recognize that supposedly physical extraterrestrial experiences may often be better analyzed in a nonphysical, and perhaps even spiritual, context. In addition, in Genesis Unveiled I discuss at some length the fact that, although I have no conceptual problem with the idea that we may have been visited by extraterrestrials throughout our history, I do not find the evidence currently put forward to support this notion at all persuasive.

In any case, what I am convinced about is that in general terms we cannot afford to take a parochial view of the universe as if we were its only intelligent inhabitants, and this has a major impact on our understanding of a spiritual worldview. Because it would be philosophically inconceivable that advanced life forms on other planets would not have souls too, no longer can we assume that the ethereal realms revolve around humanity and earthly matters alone. That is one reason why I find Fortune’s The Cosmic Doctrine persuasive, because at least in part it discusses the universal perspective. And in suggesting that each solar system or ‘logos’ has its own population of various soul-types or ‘life swarms’ in varying stages of evolution, and that each logos has its own godhead, it forces us to realize that, if we thought the organization of the ethereal realms must be complex when viewing it from a primarily human and geocentric perspective, the schema for the universe as a whole must be incredibly much more complex again. This is why I indicated in the last chapter that Modi’s suggestion of a mere seven godheads underneath the Ultimate Source was likely to be a massive underestimate. It is also why I repeatedly insist that any esoteric model that purports to show the way in which we can reunite with the Ultimate Source that does not show successive stages of reunification – first with the godhead of our solar logos, then perhaps that of our galactic logos, before finally we reach the Ultimate – is only demonstrating its geocentric limitations of context. This is perhaps to be expected of historical models, but modern ones have no excuses.

Fortune suggests that souls are primarily attached to their own solar system, and given that complex physical life forms such as human beings can only evolve and survive on planets that are the appropriate distance from their sun – so that they are neither so close as to be raging gaseous infernos, nor so far as to be frozen wastelands – there would normally only be one planet per system on which they might evolve, if at all. Nevertheless, in assuming in Genesis Unveiled that certain highly experienced souls must have incarnated in human form as much as 100,000 years ago in order to bring a spiritual worldview into the physical plane of earth for the first time, I was always intrigued as to how such souls might have gained their own soul experience. In fact in an unpublished accompanying novel called Autobiography of an Angel I postulated that one option would have been to gain this experience by incarnating on other planets in intelligent life forms that were further along the evolutionary path at that time.

This supposition was subsequently confirmed when I came across Newton’s work, because his subjects specifically confirm that souls can and do incarnate on other planets. They even report that normal human souls sometimes incarnate in other perhaps slightly more primitive life forms on other planets before incarnating as humans, and it seems such ‘introductory’ lives will always be relatively easy and less demanding than those on earth. Alternatively human souls may sometimes request an intermediate incarnation on another planet to gain a different type of experience – and this is a genuine incarnation, rather than an interlife visit to the planet’s intermediate plane. The life form they incarnate into is always the most dominant intelligence on that planet, and in the latter case these lives on other worlds are in no sense seen as a temporary demotion or punishment. As I indicated in chapter 7, this new context might well explain apparent animal incarnations on earth. And some of his subjects are able to recall, for example, genuine incarnate lives as intelligent flying creatures or marine animals, where the details indicate that the planet is not earth.

But Newton suggests that there also exist relatively old souls whose former planet was destroyed or rendered inhabitable so they could not return, or who come to earth to face a more difficult challenge, and that these ‘hybrid souls’ sometimes have great trouble in adapting. He indicates that, although many go on to live a series of productive and fulfilling lives on earth, those who fail to adapt can often become inflicted with severe psychological problems. One of his subjects even suggests that the most maladjusted humans on earth, those that tend to repeatedly commit heinous crimes, are almost certainly hybrid souls – and these are the ones who, if they persist in their destructive behavior over repeated incarnations, are most likely to be ‘remodeled’ in the ethereal realms.

Most of our other pioneers make no real mention of incarnations on other planets. This is not necessarily surprising, from a number of perspectives. First, they may not have been open to the possibility, and so did not deliberately investigate it, even perhaps ignoring any potential leads from their subjects. Second, they may not have taken their subjects back to any incarnations before they first came to earth. And third, they may have confused such incarnations with interlife experiences in the ethereal realms, or with incarnations on earth itself. Nevertheless, Ramster records one subject making a brief reference to coming from ‘another universe’ before her first incarnation on earth, although she was supposedly not allowed to remember much about it. And Modi makes a brief reference to the possibility of possession by extraterrestrial spirits.

The one other pioneer that does discuss this issue in any detail is TenDam, and he does so once again within his context of souls having different experiences before commencing their incarnations on earth. His final evolutionary family, which I did not mention at the beginning of this chapter, are those of extraterrestrial origin. He makes the distinction between fully physical incarnations, and nonphysical but still genuine incarnations, on other planets – although he actually places the latter in with his ‘originally spirit’ family. It is also interesting that he categorizes some of these extraterrestrials with animal-like bodies as genuinely ‘alien’, although accepting the limitations of this word, while he categorizes others as human, on the basis that the physical bodies they remember are clearly similar to our own:

Sometimes they sense themselves in stranger bodies: heavier, lighter, bigger or smaller, or with other proportions. Probably they are all related to us; we could mate with them. They resemble us; perhaps they lack ears or teeth, perhaps they have fewer toes, perhaps their proportions are different, but they have a similar body structure. With all these differences, they are clearly human.

Evolution by Intelligent Design, and the Human Blueprint

TenDam's sources for this are again not entirely clear, but it does raise the fascinating question of what we really mean by the word human. In older science-fiction series such as Star Trek the people from other planets usually resembled humans with ‘stick-on bits’, and we know that these portrayals were governed by the limitations of attempting to use human actors. Now that computer animation has evolved, films like Men in Black have a far greater range of alien types. But what if there is an essentially human-type body that is not restricted to earth alone, but has a far greater universality?

If we stuck to materialistic evolutionary theory alone, this possibility would be so remote as to be a nonsense. But do our pioneers have anything to add to this picture? I have briefly referred to Newton’s specialist designer souls already, and now is the time to look at their work more closely. His subjects report that these designers visit the intermediate realms of life-supporting planets to manipulate energy patterns by ‘thought-form’, and those who are in training create first inanimate objects such as rocks, and then animate forms such as plants, trees and eventually various animal life forms of increasing complexity. This is how one relatively experienced soul reported on her interlife assignment as a trainee designer, in which she was part of a team that had to redress an imbalance in the ecosystem of a distant planet that was not being resolved by evolutionary adaptation alone:

So, basically the problem on Jaspear involves the ecosystem?

Yes, the thick vines… a voracious vinelike bush. It grows so fast it kills those plants needed for the food supply. There is little space left for the land creatures of Jaspear to graze….

What is the assignment?

To create an animal which will eat the vines – to control the spreading of this bush which chokes off so much other vegetation.

What animal?

It is the Rinucula.

How are you going to do that with an animal that is not indigenous to Jaspear?

By creating a mutation from an existing small four-footed animal and accelerating its growth.

Kala, you can change the DNA genetic codes of one animal to create another?

I could not do this by myself. We have the combined energy of my training class, plus the skillful manipulation of the two seniors who have accompanied us on this field trip.

You use your energy to alter the molecular chemistry of an organism in order to circumvent natural selection?

Yes, to radiate the cells of a group of the small animals. We mutate the existing species and make it much larger so it will survive. Since we don’t have the time to wait for natural selection, we will also accelerate growth of the four-legged animal.

Do you accelerate the growth of the mutation so that the Rinucula appears right away, or do you accelerate the size of the creature itself?

Both – we want the Rinucula to be big and we want his evolutionary change to take place in one generation.

How many earth years will this take?

Oh… fifty years or so… to us it seems like a day.

This and other accounts lend a completely new meaning to the idea that the ‘Hand of God’ lies behind all of creation, and arguably provide significant support for the ‘intelligent design’ view of evolution. It seems that highly advanced ‘masters of design’ would have been involved in the creation of entire solar systems and their physical planets, and presumably also in the initial blueprint designs for the various life forms available to inhabit different types of planet. But the example above shows that subsequent implementation of these designs on evolving planets is delegated to less highly trained designers whose work can sometimes prove slightly fallible. It also shows that evolutionary patterns on any planet are not totally predetermined, precisely because natural selection and other evolutionary mechanisms still have a vital role to play.

If we apply s to the idea of a human-type body, I would suggest that this might well be one of the initial blueprints created by the design masters for planets with atmospheres similar to our own. The notion that many of these might exist is not beyond the bounds of scientific possibility, and in fact Newton’s subjects specifically confirm it. So on those planets where it was appropriate – which would not be all of them because of atmospheric and other variations – I would suggest that the evolutionary process might well follow a general earthlike blueprint. For example, designer souls might nudge the processes of evolution to ensure that mammalian life forms developed on the given planet at some point, then nudge them a little more to ensure the development of a particular mammalian species towards an apelike creature, and then nudge one strain of this a little further so that it eventually evolved into a human form. Such a process would also produce natural evolutionary variations in the human form from planet to planet, dictated by local environment and circumstances. Impossible? Far-fetched? Perhaps, but personally I do not think so.

What proportion of souls incarnating on earth originally come from other planets? None of the pioneers tend to put an estimate on this, but we know that very few of their subjects report having had extraterrestrial lives. Moreover, I tend to favor Fortune’s suggestion that in the main our souls are attached to their planet of choice. Based on these two factors, I would suggest that the number of souls currently incarnating on earth who are of extraterrestrial origin is not likely to be particularly high.

Atlantis and Lemuria, and Incarnation in Pre-Human Form

I indicated in a previous chapter that I am extremely doubtful about suggestions of a supposedly high-technology civilization in earth’s distant past, often under the guise of Atlantis or Lemuria. But what if such supposed memories can be explained by incarnations on other more evolved planets? I originally suggested this in Genesis Unveiled, before reading Newton’s second book in which he confirms the possibility.

Most of our main pioneers do not regress their subjects back as far as this. Goldberg makes a passing reference to having regressed many patients back to lives in Atlantis and Lemuria, but he provides no details and seems to place this very much in a Caycean context. Again TenDam has more to say, although as usual it is unclear whether he is referencing other people’s material or his own when he discusses past lives on these continents. However, he does admit that such regressions are often influenced by theosophical and Caycean material, and warns against assuming that they are either lives on earth or, for that matter, physical incarnations at all.

From a broader perspective, in Genesis Unveiled I discuss Helena Blavatsky’s celebrated idea of various ‘root races’ that have colonized earth for millions of years; and I indicate that I can only conceive of the Atlantean and Lemurian elements of these as having any validity in relation to earth itself if they are placed in an entirely nonphysical context. Even Blavatsky herself accepts that the earliest root races were purely nonphysical forms and, if my point is accepted, there is some similarity between Blavatsky’s root races and Fortune’s idea of life swarms attached to our solar logos. But to what extent do these root races or life swarms, which may have been visiting earth’s intermediate plane for millions of years, represent relatively experienced human-type souls?

I postulated in Genesis Unveiled that the traditions of the creation of man, and especially of unsuccessful first attempts in which the creations could not ‘speak’ or ‘sing the praises of the creator’, might represent references to attempts by relatively experienced human-type souls to incarnate on earth before the physical vehicles available – for example, earlier hominid forms – were sufficiently advanced to properly accommodate their soul energy. I also indicated that Newton’s subjects specifically bear this explanation out, even though I only came across his material after I had made my own interpretation. But Newton’s subjects only date such experiments to a million years ago at most.

Intriguingly, I now find that TenDam reports on the findings of another past-life researcher, Pieter Barten, whose subjects consistently regressed to a time when they were able to enter large primates for short periods only – but during which time the primates temporarily walked upright instead of on all fours. Even more astounding is TenDam’s report of how one subject – not his own – recalled attempting to enter the body of a dinosaur but being unable to sustain the experiment because of her human consciousness. This new evidence – new to me, that is – suggests that such experiments go back far farther, to at least sixty-five million years ago. It also suggests that rather than involving full incarnation as I had assumed, these experimenting souls were able to merely visit earth’s intermediate plane and enter certain physical forms on a temporary basis to ‘try them out’ – presumably dominating any lower form of collectivized soul energy already in occupation. Above all, these experiments seem to involve individualized and arguably human-type souls.

All of this tends to imply that for millions of years there may have been a significant stock of relatively experienced human-type souls either genuinely incarnating in some sort of nonphysical form on earth’s intermediate plane – or for that matter the intermediate planes of any of the other planets in our solar system – or at least visiting earth’s intermediate plane regularly and performing temporary experiments to determine when a suitable physical vehicle had become available. It seems such souls were not of the collective energy type associated with elementals or nature and animal spirits, but nor were they extraterrestrial inasmuch as they were clearly associated with earth – or at least with our solar system. And if I am right that these were then groundbreaking experiments whose outcome was unknown, rather than merely attempts by particular curious souls to briefly experience early physical forms on earth, arguably we would then have to assume that earth may have been the first planet in the universe to harbor the types of life form suitable for our atmosphere – and possibly the first to harbor the human-type life form. But this would not necessarily imply that other planets in the universe would not have evolved far more advanced but different life forms before earth did. As to where and how complex physical life forms evolved for the very first time, it seems logical that certain planets in various solar systems in various galaxies would have been chosen for initial experiments in creation by thought-form for which there would have been no previous physical blueprints.

Nevertheless, does this mean that the bulk of human souls have been around for millions of years? I would still argue not, and that most of us who are incarnating on earth now do not form part of these pioneering and perhaps rather less populated human-type life swarms. On that basis, Newton’s and Modi’s evidence as regards recent, continuous and ongoing human soul birthing still stands. I would also still argue that distant memories of Atlantis and Lemuria, or at least those that involve high levels of technology, are likely to relate to experiences of other planets – whether physical or not.

Levels of Amnesia, and Humanity's Fall from Grace

Newton’s subjects consistently express the view that incarnation on earth in human form is in fact one of the most testing of experiences, partly due to the complexity of the human condition especially in the modern world, and partly due to its general combination of both physical and mental challenges. By comparison they report that some other planets play host to essentially nonphysical though still incarnatory life forms – which backs up what they said in chapter 5 about explorers visiting purely mental worlds, as well as TenDam’s comments about nonphysical incarnations on other planets above – and that these provide a less challenging existence. They also report that incarnation on earth is made more difficult because our amnesia about our true spiritual nature is greater than that of most life forms on other planets, and I would conjecture that this may be related to their separate reports that souls can take more of their energy into incarnation on other planets without blowing their brain circuits. Indeed, they report that our amnesia has actually increased in the last few millennia, but that there may be some ethereal pressure for this trend to be reversed:

A number of my more advanced subjects have stated there is a growing movement in the spirit world to ‘change the game rules on earth’. These people say their souls had less amnesia about Self and the interlife when they lived in earlier cultures. It seems in the last few thousand years there has been tighter blocking, on a conscious level, of our immortal memories. This has been a contributing factor in the loss of faith in our capacity for self-transcendence. Earth is filled with people who feel an empty hopelessness toward the meaning of life. The lack of connection with our immortality combined with the availability of mind-altering chemicals and over-population has created rumbles upstairs. I am told large numbers of souls who have had more frequent incarnations in recent centuries on earth are opting, when they get the chance, for less stressful worlds. There are enlightened places where amnesia is greatly reduced without causing homesickness for the spirit world. As we approach the next millennium, the masters who direct earth’s destiny appear to be making changes to permit more information and understanding of who we are and why we are here to come into our lives.

To the extent that this increased amnesiac blocking is the same as our general separation from our true spiritual wisdom and roots, I argue in Genesis Unveiled that it occurred for the first time tens of thousands of years ago. I also suggest that this led to the karmic catastrophe and rebuilding of 11,500 years ago, when a spiritual worldview was once again reintroduced, but that a second separation has since occurred progressively in the last five thousand years or so. My argument has always been that both of these separations, or falls from grace, resulted purely from humanity making its own choice to become totally immersed in the material world at the expense of the spiritual – and not from any deliberate policy in the ethereal realms over which we had no control. It is not entirely clear from Newton’s description which of these two possibilities he supports, but one of Cannon’s subjects makes some interesting observations about what appears to be the original fall from grace:

We enjoy these times when we can commune. This was the way it was at one time before on your planet when all could converse freely as we do now. However, there was the time of the fall…. This was the time when the knowledge was lost, and the consciousness turned down, so to say, towards the earth and this higher energy plane was disregarded and discarded. So you can see from a strictly analogical standpoint there was a definite fall of consciousness from the higher plane to the more base earth plane. There was not, as has previously been felt, a surge of evil present when this fall occurred. It was simply that the attention of those inhabitants was shifted from the higher to the lower planes, so to say. This is what is meant by the fall. This is not a right or wrong judgment. It is simply a fact which is in the realm of truth. So you can see that when you lose your sight of who and what you are, then you would tend to wander, as humanity has done on this planet for many millennia now. It was simply a forgetting of the true identity. A lowering of the consciousness, so to say, and forgetting that all are truly part of the whole.

Although this subject also briefly mentions the fallen angel Lucifer – ‘who was one with God at the time of formation, but who, through his own want for power, lost all’ – we can see that he is not explicitly mentioned as being associated with the fall of humanity. Nor, for what it is worth, is there any support for the separate but related Christian idea that humanity was divorced from God right at the outset when Adam and Eve partook of the forbidden fruit. And the general tenor of this report still suggests that for the most part we were and are the masters of our own fate, and the architects of our own downfall or salvation.

By contrast, as we might expect Modi has a few words to say about Lucifer in Remarkable Healings, and even more in a follow-up book called Memories of God and Creation, which was first published in 2000. In fact in this book she provides considerably more transcripted details from her sessions with patients about interlife reviews and planning, which broadly speaking is entirely consistent with our other pioneers’ findings – and even adds some previously missing elements that would fill in some of her gaps in the grids in chapters 5 and 6. But because it is so recent its independence from their work is even more questionable than that of her first book, so I have not included these new details in my previous analysis.

Her main focus in this second book, as the title suggests, is on the information she was able to glean from her subjects about the nature of God and the original creation of the universe. In fact I find her descriptions of the original state of the Ultimate Source, and of how it split apart to create all the ethereal, intermediate and eventually physical forms in the universe during what I normally refer to as the ‘dawn of Brahma’, highly compelling – and consistent with both my own reinterpretations of ancient cosmological traditions in Genesis Unveiled and with Fortune’s channelings. However, much of Modi’s remaining material again shows a high degree of Christian bias. She devotes a whole chapter to her subjects’ reports of how Lucifer rebelled against the Ultimate Source right at the outset, and how he took a significant number of other angels with him – although this is admittedly consistent with Cannon’s subject’s report above. Her subjects then go on to describe how God created plants, animals and humans all in physical form and all seemingly at the outset, which would totally bypass the processes of physical evolution. And one even reports that a number of souls entered the bodies of apelike creatures that had been specially created for them on earth – so far so good in some senses – but also that some of these then entered a garden, which is clearly Eden even though the name is not used, where their eating of fruit belonging to Lucifer resulted in their own separation from God. Accordingly, I am unable to take much of this material seriously.

In any case, even if our spiritual separation cannot be blamed on the influence of Lucifer, is it possible that it was instigated by a deliberate ethereal policy to increase humanity’s level of amnesiac blocking at some point in our past, as Newton is perhaps suggesting? I have to say that the possible motives for this remain entirely unclear. After all, we can no longer fall back on the normal explanation that if we did not have our current levels of amnesia we would be too homesick for the ethereal realms, or would blow our brain circuits, because the suggestion is clearly that in our original state as humans on earth we did suffer from far less amnesia and were not adversely affected. The only other explanation I can think of is that the ethereal powers might have decided to make earth the toughest test of all, and experimented by deliberately increasing our amnesia from its original level.

On the other hand, I suggest in Genesis Unveiled that a spiritual worldview was brought into the earth plane by certain angelic-type souls, who were specifically assigned to the task precisely because they suffered from far less incarnate amnesia about the ethereal realms than the majority of human-type souls. I argue that they can incarnate at any time, but that they did so in particular at two key points in humanity’s history. First, around 100,000 years ago – a date based on the often-overlooked but crucially important first appearance of deliberate human burial in the archaeological record – to introduce a spiritual worldview into the physical plane for the first time, thereby ushering in the ‘golden age’ of spirituality that all ancient traditions describe. And second, after the catastrophe of 11,500 years ago in order to reintroduce it. I also argue that on both occasions we have failed the test by gradually slipping back into materialism. If I am right it just may be that, as Newton reports, the ethereal powers have decided that earth is too tough a test as currently configured, and are considering deliberately reducing the levels of amnesia for all humans incarnating on earth in the future to help us to reestablish our spiritual roots en masse – without the need for a catastrophe or a new influx of angelic-type souls – and this time to maintain them more successfully as well. And if they do not regard this as cheating, then I am all for it.

Source References

Newton, Michael, Journey of Souls (Llewellyn, 2002): human soul as separate category, chapter 10, p. 162 and chapter 11, p. 193; space of transformation, chapter 10, p. 168; intervals between incarnations, chapter 12, pp. 202–3; examples of animal-style lives on other planets, chapter 11, pp. 190–3; early incarnations on unknown landmasses, chapter 11, 171–2; incarnation on earth as testing experience, chapter 10, pp. 157–8; ethereal pressure for reduction in amnesia, conclusion, p. 276.

Newton, Michael, Destiny of Souls (Llewellyn, 2003): more on human soul as separate category, chapter 5, pp. 125–33 and chapter 6, p. 203; animal souls, chapter 7, pp. 296–302; incarnation as dominant life form on other planets, chapter 6, p. 203; psychotic hybrid souls, chapter 4, pp. 100–3; designer souls, chapter 8, pp. 334–44; Atlantean lives as memories of incarnation on another planet, chapter 4, p. 100; incarnation on mental worlds, chapter 8, p. 351.

Modi, Shakuntala, Remarkable Healings (Hampton Roads, 1997): soul birthing, chapter 2, pp. 89–91; possession by extraterrestrial spirits, chapter 5, p. 356; Lucifer, chapter 5, pp. 314–21.

Modi, Shakuntala, Memories of God and Creation (Hampton Roads, 2000): the Ultimate Godhead, chapters 2–4; Lucifer, chapter 5; creation of all life forms, chapter 7; the fall in Eden, chapter 12, pp. 138–46.

Netherton, Morris, Past Lives Therapy (Ace Books, 1979): evolution up nonhuman ranks, ‘questions’, p. 218.

Cannon, Dolores, Between Death and Life (Gateway, 2003): animal souls, chapter 6, p. 96; elementals and nature spirits, chapter 6, pp. 91–5; excess of souls, chapter 16, pp. 234–5; Lucifer and the fall, chapter 10, pp. 153 and 166–7.

TenDam, Hans, Exploring Reincarnation (Rider, 2003): origins of souls, chapter 12, pp. 248–66; pathological identification with animal forms, chapter 12, pp. 263–6; Atlantis and Lemuria, chapter 12, pp. 252–3 and 262; experiments with entering a dinosaur and a primate, chapter 12, pp. 251 and 254–5.

Ten Dam, Hans, Deep Healing (Tasso Publishing, 1996): origins of souls, chapter 8, pp. 224–35 (abbreviated from material in previous book).

Stevenson, Ian, Children Who Remember Previous Lives (University Press of Virginia, 1987): rare cases of intermediate animal lives, chapter 10, p. 210; intervals between incarnations, chapter 5, p. 117.

Whitton, Joel, Life Between Life (Warner Books, 1988): intervals between incarnations, chapter 4, p. 52.

Ramster, Peter, The Search for Lives Past (Somerset Film & Publishing, 1992): intervals between incarnations, chapter 7, pp. 268–9; incarnations on other planets, chapter 7, p. 267.

Goldberg, Bruce, Past Lives, Future Lives (Ballantine, 1993): intervals between incarnations, chapter 3, p. 37; Atlantis and Lemuria, chapter 3, pp. 36–7.

Muller, Hans, Reincarnation: based on facts (Psychic Press, 1970): intervals between incarnations, chapter 8, pp. 275–6.

Lawton, Ian, Genesis Unveiled (Virgin, 2004): ancient technology and astronauts, chapter 15; Atlantis and Lemuria, chapter 14; Blavatsky and root races, chapter 13; the creation of man, chapter 8; cosmology traditions, chapter 16; dating of the onset of the golden age, chapter 10, pp. 188–9; dating of the catastrophe, chapter 12, pp. 230–1.