Summary:
• Reports from NDEs, mediums, and past life memories suggest souls plan their lifetimes, but none of this is scientific proof.
• Souls are said to choose their parents and life circumstances based on what they want to learn or experience.
• A wise group called the Council of Elders reportedly advises souls before they incarnate.
• Souls make “soul contracts,” which are agreements about major life events, challenges, and relationships.
• Souls belong to soul groups, which act like spiritual families that support each other across many lifetimes.
• The “veil of forgetfulness” hides past life memories so each lifetime feels new and authentic.
• Guardian angels protect the soul’s life plan but do not prevent every hardship.
• Spirit guides help people make moral choices and stay aligned with their soul’s plan.
• Some people may hear an inner voice that could be a spirit guide, the subconscious, or something else, so caution and testing are important.
• A small number of souls may have lived on other planets and incarnate on Earth as “star seeds” to spread positive energy.
• Souls may enter the body early in pregnancy or just before birth, depending on the plan.
• Birth begins the next stage of the soul’s chosen adventure on Earth.
The following answer is based on reports from near-death experiencers, psychic mediums, and individuals who say that they retain some memories from before they were born. Some of these reports might be true, or all of them might be true, or all of them might be false, perhaps due to hallucinations. When investigated scientifically, none of those reports is absolute proof of an afterlife or of reincarnation. So, please treat these reports with some prudent skepticism.
If any of these reports are true, the lack of absolute proof could be deliberate—a prohibition imposed by God because absolute proof of an afterlife would profoundly change the behavior of all humankind and perhaps disrupt the purpose of Earth itself.
Without any absolute proof, we are left with only the reports. And some speculation.
· Before you are born, you choose your parents and circumstances.
The reports suggest that every soul has plenty of freedom to plan its human lifetime. There is an actual plan, created by the soul for its human self. Some souls have relatively very few requirements: they want the experience of a human lifetime, but the specific details are not very important to them. Other souls have more requirements because they want their human lifetime to include particular experiences for spiritual growth. Some souls are especially careful about choosing their human parents: the soul may secretly watch a variety of potential parents to consider their personalities, their interests, how loving they are, how healthy they are, how troubled they are, where they live, what they possess, and what their future is likely to be.
Some souls want a wide variety of human experiences. Much like a student choosing particular courses to attend, a soul may choose particular experiences to have. A soul with no prior lifetime as a human may not fully understand that terrible experiences are extremely painful to endure; consequently, that naive soul may attempt to include too many in its life plan. Before the plan is implemented (before the soul incarnates as a human), the soul is warned not to include so much pain and suffering in its plan. Not only would the lifetime be horrid, the person could go insane, or worse.
Presumably, if multiple universes exist and if each Universe contains a different version of you, then those parallel lifetimes are planned at the same time.
· The Council of Elders.
Before incarnating, most souls, maybe all souls, meet with a group of very wise souls who have lived many, many human lifetimes. That group is sometimes called Ascended Masters or the Council of Elders. The size and membership of the Council varies for each soul and sometimes also for each lifetime. The Council does not judge the soul. The Council does not decide which souls get to experience a human lifetime and which souls do not. The Council never refuses any soul as supposedly not qualified. There is no need to refuse anyone. Souls are eternal, and they have the extraordinary resources of God and the spiritual realm to help them. Those resources include the Council of Elders.
The usual purpose of a human lifetime is to encourage the soul’s spiritual development. To help the soul achieve that goal, the Council offers advice and assistance. The spiritual lessons of a lifetime can include unconditional love, empathy and compassion, forgiveness, emotional detachment from materialism and worldly addictions, humility, honesty, integrity, overcoming fear, and patience instead of frustration. Reportedly, various members of the Council specialize in each of those lessons.
If a soul has already experienced a human lifetime and is preparing to live another, the Council may discuss the past lifetime and offer advice for the next, including what to learn and how.
· Soul contracts.
Historically, human imagination has sometimes portrayed the afterlife as some sort of Divine courtroom where souls are judged according to religious laws, such as the Ten Commandments. Some near-death experiencers have described the existence of soul contracts, a term that sounds like a legal document. Courtrooms were invented by humans, and so you might wonder why God needs anything associated with courtrooms. The reason is more human than Divine. In the material Universe, many living beings must cooperate to survive and, therefore, they make agreements. A contract is a specific type of agreement. The term soul contract implies something that most humans can understand, and this is why the term is used. Some aspects of the afterlife deliberately mimic some aspects of our lives on Earth so that humans can understand them.
The words soul contract may imply something required by a law, but there is no law enforcing it. There is a moral obligation to comply because it is an agreement between souls and also with God. A soul can break it, but doing so has consequences for the other souls who agreed to it. For example, according to one report, a particular soul was supposed to incarnate as the baby of a particular mother in accordance with a soul contract, but at the last moment the soul decided not to. Consequently, the human baby was stillborn (born dead). The mother was emotionally devastated.
When you watch human actors performing a play, the actors should not be seen carrying copies of the play’s script and reading the script out loud. The actors should already know what the script requires them to say and do. The play and its characters should appear to be real—an appearance which is an illusion, including the illusion that there is no script. A soul contract is similar to a script because it specifies the roles that the souls will perform as humans and some of the experiences they will undergo. A soul contract may also specify particular situations and events that will occur, including problems, opportunities, and tragedies.
A major difference between a soul contract and a script is that the actors performing a script already know the outcome of the play because they know the script, but you as a person do not know what your soul contract says, at least not all of it, and therefore you can only guess what will happen. The future of your life is a mystery.
Your soul contract is kept in the spiritual realm; it is not a physical document that can be read on Earth. Some near-death experiencers have reported that, during their NDE, they saw their soul contract. For example, after someone suffers a very difficult life, that person might demand to know why. Typically, the answer received during the NDE is that the person’s soul deliberately planned that very difficult life. Then, as proof, the person might be shown the soul contract.
· Soul groups.
The typical soul belongs to a group that is sort of a family, called a soul group. It is a family without parents or children or siblings or aunts or uncles, but every member has probably performed those roles for other members of the group during their human lifetimes. Every soul in the group knows each other, loves each other, and supports each other, although some of the ways that souls support each other might surprise you. There are cases in which a human grandparent dies and later reincarnates as that grandparent’s grandchild. One possible reason is that members of that particular human family are also members of the same soul group.
A soul group is also like a company of professional actors. When a lifetime is planned, some members of the soul group may perform particular roles that will help to ensure that the lessons of the lifetime are experienced according to the plan.
Have you ever known somebody for a short time, perhaps meeting that person only once or twice but the experience changed your life? That important experience and the change it caused were probably specified in the plan arranged by your soul contract. The person you knew might be a member of your soul group.
You may also know a person who committed a great wrong against you, an act of cruelty that changed the direction of your life. That act of cruelty was probably specified in your soul contract, and that person is probably a member of your soul group. This news might be difficult to accept, but bad experiences can influence our lives in good ways. Months, years, or decades may pass before you realize the good influence of a bad experience.
· Veil of Forgetfulness.
Nearly all souls who incarnate as humans have no awareness that they ever existed as souls before they were born. That lack of awareness is deliberate and sometimes called the veil of forgetfulness. (The veil is symbolic, not a real veil.) Souls do not entirely lose their memories of past lives: most of those memories are retained in the spiritual realm, and a few memories are locked away in the human subconscious.
The veil of forgetfulness has several purposes. A human lifetime should feel like a new beginning, but it cannot feel entirely new if the person remembers any past lives. The veil adds authenticity to your behavior during this lifetime. Many humans believe this lifetime is their first lifetime, maybe their only lifetime, and so they make decisions and moral judgments within the limited perspective of a human—not with the long perspective of an eternal soul.
Remembering numerous past lives can be a burden. Some of those past lives probably involved painful emotional trauma, which the veil conceals unless a soul contract and its plan allow for some to be remembered. A small percentage of people do have some memories of past lives, but those memories are usually in the form of dreams (which can be nightmares whenever trauma is involved).
· Guardian angels.
Every person is assigned at least one guardian angel. The title of guardian angel may imply that this angel (yes, an actual angel) would protect you from every possible danger, but this is not accurate. The mission of a guardian angel is to help protect the plan arranged by your soul contract. The reason is because daily life does not always match the plan the soul contract tried to arrange. On Earth, free will is somewhat unpredictable. Free will affects every activity and every decision of every living being. Those activities and decisions, which are almost infinite in their possibilities, interact in unexpected ways. Accidents happen, including accidents that are not part of your plan and would disrupt it. That is when guardian angels intervene. They anticipate what could go wrong and they intervene to prevent it.
Guardian angels usually intervene secretly, but not always. Small events that you might consider to be little miracles could be the result of guardian angels secretly changing the situation to prevent an outcome not intended by the plan. You may never notice those miracles because most people are not supposed to. If you do notice, you might assume that the outcome is the result of pure luck and random chance. Nevertheless, strange things do happen sometimes. A person who is about to cross a street may suddenly feel a push backwards, causing the person to avoid getting hit by a speeding vehicle—a deadly danger that the person did not see coming. Or the person may hear somebody say something like “Step back!”—and so the person steps back and avoids getting hit by the speeding vehicle. But when the person looks around to see who saved the person, there is nobody there (at least not physically). In hospitals, a nurse might see a guardian angel repairing a sick patient—yes, the supernatural experience of seeing a guardian angel repairing a patient—but the nurse is reluctant to tell anybody because skeptics will assume that the nurse is either hallucinating or lying. (Why did the nurse see the guardian angel? Presumably because the nurse was supposed to see the guardian angel, in accordance with a soul contract.) There are cases in which a patient suddenly recovers from a terrible injury or illness, which utterly surprises the attending physicians whenever they lack a scientific medical explanation. They might not like to call that recovery a miracle, but it could be the result of a guardian angel.
You might wonder if guardian angels ever get tired. Becoming tired or worn out are traits that exist among material things in a material Universe. Angels are non-material, and so they never get tired. Sometimes an angel may assume a human appearance for a particular mission and can be seen, but this is very unusual.
Remember that the purpose of your guardian angel is to protect the plan arranged by your soul contract. That plan may specify that you, or a loved one, must experience something horrible, and guardian angels will not prevent that. But also remember that the plan has a purpose, that your soul agreed to the soul contract, and that your soul is immortal.
· Spirit guides.
You also have a spirit guide, which is another non-material entity. Remember that your spirit is not your soul. Your soul contains your Divine essence, while your spirit is your personal intentions expressed through your actions. Your spirit guide advises your spirit—guiding your decisions and actions through a lifetime of moral questions and dilemmas. Your soul contract has already arranged a plan. Your guardian angel protects the plan from random interference. Your spirit guide encourages you to always adhere to the plan.
There are a wide variety of human beliefs about spirit guides. Some people ask for guidance from their family ancestors, or from saints, or directly from God. In Christianity, the non-material Holy Spirit can help people to make moral decisions, a Divine service that is very similar to the mission of spirit guides who are also servants of God. God often uses Divine assistants. (The Holy Quran was conveyed to the Prophet Muhammad by the Archangel Gabriel.) The point is that there is a plan, which is part of a larger Divine plan. You may not know what the plan is, but your spirit guide knows the plan.
Most people are not aware that they have a spirit guide, but a spirit guide can be effective without being known or acknowledged. Your spirit guide does this by communicating directly with your mind. For example, if you suddenly think of a good idea, the origin of that idea might be your mind—or the origin might be your spirit guide communicating with your mind. Your soul guide may also help you to notice clues and patterns in situations, encouraging you to realize a moral lesson.
Your spirit guide is separate from your conscience. Your conscience is your mind’s interpretation of morality. Your spirit guide may identify moral issues that your conscience may not notice, or your conscience may cause you to feel guilty for reasons that your spirit guide knows are quite forgivable, maybe not sins at all.
Sometimes a person’s behavior may stray so far from the plan intended by the soul contract that an extreme intervention is required. A traumatic event might be an extreme intervention—if it causes the person to reconsider how the person has been behaving. A traumatic event might include a near-death experience, although an NDE can occur for other reasons as well. The plan itself may already include one or more traumatic events, but some events are actually interventions because they are not part of the plan. (A few accidents are genuine accidents.) In very rare situations a spirit guide may appear in a physical form, temporarily, to express a message.
When your soul planned your lifetime, your soul also chose your spirit guide. The plan arranged by your soul contract is clear enough that your spirit guide does not need any training. You may have asked the Council of Elders to recommend someone to be your spirit guide, but the final decision is yours. Your spirit guide could be someone from your soul group, although this is not a requirement. The typical spirit guide has lived many lifetimes, usually including many human lifetimes but this is not a requirement. The typical spirit guide has volunteered for the mission, although some are asked to serve who did not volunteer.
To be a spirit guide is considered a privilege, but the mission can be very difficult. It is not physically difficult (the spirit guide is non-material) but emotionally difficult. When a child is suffering for some reason, the parent watching the child also suffers. Your spirit guide is not your parent, but when you are suffering, your spirit guide is watching you and also suffers, in empathy. Some people have hardened their positive emotions so cruelly that they cannot feel empathy when a loved one suffers. But the emotions of a spirit guide are not hardened. The spirit guide feels total empathy.
All spirit guides have direct access to the spiritual realm and to God, and so they do have Divine help. They can ask for answers if they need to, and their emotions are not entirely vulnerable to the emotional pressures of your own lifetime, including any physical pains your body is experiencing. Still, your spirit guide loves you dearly and knows all of your thoughts, intimately, throughout your lifetime. The emotions you feel, including negative emotions, your spirit guide can also feel. Your guide may try to avoid feeling negative emotions independent of yourself, but your guide can still feel doubts or concerns about how well your guide is performing. “Should I have encouraged the person more than I did? Should I have tried a different way to encourage the person?” Since your spirit guide already knows your soul contract, your guide knows plenty of information that cannot be revealed to you, at least not yet, and this can cause your guide to feel uncomfortable sometimes.
Fortunately, being a spirit guide is also emotionally rewarding, much like the rewards felt by a devoted parent, teacher, or mentor. Another reward is watching people fall in love. Usually your spirit guide knows what will happen next in your life, but sometimes not, and sometimes your spirit guide is actually surprised. The existence of free will inserts uncertainties into your lifetime.
Some people can actually hear their spirit guide talk to them, and they have conversations. This is more common than you might think. At least ten percent of the human population—at least one person among every ten—hears voices in their head, and yet the vast majority of those people are not considered to be mentally ill. They include many mystics. Historically, for centuries, such people were considered to have a gift from God. Scientific studies have found that hearing an inner voice begins typically after the person has experienced an extremely traumatic event, such as the death of a loved one, or after a profound religious experience.
An inner voice in your head sounds like thoughts are being spoken but that someone else is saying them. They are said in your brain, and this is why the scientific materialist explanation is that you are hallucinating, that some part of your brain is imagining it. The voice may even use your favorite phrases. But this materialist explanation does not exclude the possibility that a non-material being is communicating with you. That being, such as your spirit guide, may actually tell you that it is using your own brain to talk to you. This method is necessary because if the voice were entirely miraculous and if that miracle were confirmed by scientific investigation, then the afterlife could be scientifically proven. That could profoundly change the behavior of humankind and also disrupt the purpose of Earth. So, to preserve the mystery, a simpler scientific explanation is available, an explanation that cannot disprove the non-material source of the voice. The miracle is meant for the participants, not for anyone else.
In the Christian Gospel of Mary, a gospel which is not included in the Christian New Testament, Mary Magdalene tells the male disciples of Jesus, who died two days earlier, that the dead Jesus spoke to her in a dream and taught her some profound spiritual lessons. Most of the male disciples do not believe her, which causes her to cry. She tells them that the teachings she received are so complicated that her mind could not possibly have imagined them. You do not need to be a Christian to sympathize with Mary’s argument. You may know that your own mind is not smart enough to imagine the profound spiritual ideas that your head is hearing from a voice inside. The explanation that a spirit guide told you can be easier for you to believe than the materialist explanation that your mind, in less than a moment of conscious thought, somehow imagined information so complicated and profound. This argument may not persuade many skeptics, but the knowledge you received was given to you, not to them.
Still, be skeptical. An inner voice in your head may not be your spirit guide and it may not be your friend. If you hate yourself, and if the inner voice is telling you that it hates you, or if it is encouraging you to do something harmful, then the inner voice could be coming from your subconscious mind, expressing your self-hatred. Other explanations are also possible, including a malfunctioning brain or the possibility of a bad spirit. If it is encouraging you to do something harmful, then you should probably seek the help of a mental health professional—and there is no shame in seeking that help. A priest or other religious counselor may also be helpful, but do not immediately assume that your mental problems are a form of spiritual warfare being waged by evil forces. That is a simple explanation but not always an accurate one.
The following question is not really worth asking: “Are you my spirit guide?” The inner voice may lie to you, and even a genuine spirit guide may not like the title of spirit guide. That title implies a job, like being a servant or a supervisor, instead of a mission performed by a soul who loves you deeply, always has and always will, because souls are eternal. That soul is already in a loving relationship with you. Calling that soul your “spirit guide” can sound like a strange label that understates the pure love of your relationship.
Instead, you should test the inner voice with some moral questions and moral demands. (A genuine spirit guide will understand your skepticism.) Ask the inner voice to praise God. Ask the inner voice to explain unconditional love. Find a sacred book of your religion, such as the Holy Bible or Holy Quran, turn to a section that talks about love and tell the voice to narrate that section to you. If you are a Jew, that section can be the Ten Commandments (Exodus 20:2-17 and Deuteronomy 5:6-21) or the Psalms, especially Psalms 18:2-3, 23:1-6, 86:5-7, and 145:8. If you are a Christian, some excellent sections in the New Testament are Matthew 5:1-11 and 7:15-20, Mark 1:23-26, and First Corinthians 13:4-7. If you are a Muslim, some excellent sections are Surahs 16:18, 23:97-98, 76:11 and 114:1-6. A genuine spirit guide will actually enjoy narrating those sections.
If the inner voice is your self-hatred speaking—your ego speaking—then the inner voice may still succeed in narrating one or more of those sections. (A person can believe in the importance of unconditional love and still hold self-hatred.) The solution to self-hatred is forgiveness and unconditional love. You must forgive yourself. Forgiveness is not always easy, but it is absolutely essential.
As for the inner voice, always remember that a spirit guide will offer you advice but that you are not required to follow it. The advice might be good advice (a spirit guide is supposed to offer good advice), but you have a choice—always. You may not like the advice or the choice, but the decision is yours. And the responsibility is yours. (You cannot avoid responsibility by blaming your spirit guide.)
· Star seeds.
Reportedly, some souls have already lived as intelligent beings, but on other planets. Those souls are sometimes called star seeds. You might call them aliens or extraterrestrials, but they are not. On Earth they are born as humans, they live human lifetimes, and most of them do not remember their past lives as extraterrestrials. They incarnate as humans because, reportedly, they have a mission to bring to Earth their positive energy (sometimes called their “higher frequency” or “higher resonance”) and therefore they help to raise the positive energy of the entire planet. (Be loving, kind, and care for others. Compassion raises your positive energy. Human mystics have known this about compassion for centuries.) Presumably, star seeds choose parents whose behavior and circumstances will help them perform their mission. Their mission may sound like some sort of extraterrestrial intrigue, but in practice their lifetimes can be very ordinary because anyone can be loving, kind, and caring. (More of us should be.) Do star seeds actually exist? Souls are non-material, and so the answer cannot be proven or disproven using the materialist methods of scientific Investigation.
· Initiating the plan.
Reports differ on how a soul incarnates into a human baby. Some souls, perhaps most souls, enter the womb of the mother during or soon after conception of the fetus. Then for about nine months the mother and the unborn baby develop a relationship that is physical, emotional, and spiritual. The relationship is especially spiritual if the souls of the mother and child are both members of the same soul group; however, the most important relationship between any mother and her child, whether a biological child or an adopted child, is emotional—because unconditional love matters the most.
There are reports that some souls do not incarnate into a baby body until just before the baby is born. If such reports are true, then perhaps for as long as nine months the body of the unborn baby could be waiting for a soul. Why would a soul wait to incarnate? There could be several reasons. One reason is because a soul may watch several future parents and then decide which parents the soul wants to have as parents. Another possible reason is that the soul wants to travel around in non-material form, exploring Earth and maybe the Universe, before becoming confined to the physical limitations of a human body, especially the limitations of an infant.
Another possible reason is that the soul becomes reluctant to incarnate on Earth. After leaving the infinitely wonderful realm that many of us call Heaven or Paradise, the soul suddenly feels the negative emotions and negative energy that exist on Earth, despite being intermixed with some positive emotions and positive energy. And the soul knows that its human lifetime will not get any softer. But if the soul wants to grow spiritually, then this particular opportunity begins in a womb.
When a human body is ready to host a soul, the soul enters the body through the head, presumably because the head contains the brain, which contains the mind and the person’s consciousness. The soul enters the body in a non-material way instead of through any physical holes like the mouth or the nose.
Eventually the baby is born, alive with a soul. And the latest adventure of the soul begins.