I have come to believe, in accord with Asian and Western esoteric teachings on reincarnation, that the soul chooses the family and community in which to be conceived and born, with divine guidance and in accord with karmic predispositions. Sometimes, as we have seen, there may be karmic connections or indebtedness that enter into the soul’s choice of ancestral family. As described earlier, becoming conscious of the actual soul connection with one or more of the parents or grandparents, and sometimes with ancestors further back in the parental lineages, can be enormously healing and empowering to the individual. It can lead to a sense of having an unconditionally supportive backup team and to a deeper knowing of one’s purpose in life.
If a soul’s purpose is to be a musician, he or she may choose to be born into a family where one or both of the parents, or grandparents, are themselves musicians who can nurture this particular talent. One destined to be a scientist may choose to be incarnated into a family of scientific talent and inclinations. Some souls apparently choose to be born into families of great wealth, perhaps in order to learn how to handle wealth in a way that is in accord with their spiritual purpose, without being seduced or blinded by money. Others may choose to be born into the hardship of poverty, perhaps to learn to overcome one’s circumstances or to cultivate nonmaterial values.
When people tune in to the place of soul communion and the life-preview council, they know, feel, and sense that they have, with high spiritual awareness, chosen to be here, on Earth, in this particular life for a particular purpose (or purposes). This can be a life-changing realization that puts all of our striving, confusion, and frustration in perspective. It is the moment of choice and freedom pointed to by the famous Zen koan: What was your original face before you were born? In other words—in what direction were you facing, what was your original intention, when you chose to be born?
Koans are questions not meant to be answered—just asked, repeatedly. This kind of asking opens one up to be receptive to the influx of knowing from inner, spiritual Source. Therefore, we may translate the koan as follows—and I suggest this self-inquiry for the reader—What was, and is, your soul’s vision for this life, this incarnation?
When I shared an earlier version of this chapter with Buddhist philosopher, deep ecologist, and friend Joanna Macy, she wrote to me that she was struck by how the section on incarnational choice resonated with one of the workshop processes she had developed.
In Coming Back to Life, it’s called “My Choices for this Life.” I tend to call it the “Bodhisattva Check-In”…it evolved from an earlier exercise known as “The Incarnation Committee.” It involves using the power of the imagination to…replay the decision to take birth as a human in the twentieth century, and then stepping into the particular conditions of this last birth, understanding that they are probably just right for the mission you have come to accomplish. Given the present state of the world…the results of this process are often incredibly moving and empowering.
This place of soul communion and soul council, out of which comes the choice to incarnate, is pre-conception when seen from the perspective of ordinary linear time; hence we can get there by regressive remembering. But it is also still present now, until the end of our present incarnation. We can get there by direct divination, and then bring that knowing-feeling-sensing awareness “down” through the personality systems, or “inner bodies,” and into the physical body, in a process known as soul infusion.
The highly skilled medical intuitive Caroline Myss calls the agreement made between incarnating souls the sacred contract. She says, “a Sacred Contract is an agreement your soul makes before you are born.” Sylvia Browne describes the process of choice as the designing of a chart, featuring major life events and circumstances in a kind of advance scenario.
There have been many different mappings of the major types of lifepath a soul may choose to follow, once incarnated, conceived, and born. Some, like Caroline Myss, relate the soul’s purpose to which of the twelve Zodiac signs the person is born under; the Arica esoteric school uses the nine points of the ancient enneagram to define nine types of soul orientation and values; and cultural anthropologist Angeles Arrien (1940–2014) has described a paradigm of four major “ways” (Warrior, Teacher, Healer, Visionary). In The Six Pathways of Destiny (2012), I describe six major lifepaths or fields of action in society that souls may choose—concentrating on one or combining two or three or more.
In divinations to the soul council we are not so concerned with the details of the different paths, but with the process by which a person may themselves get an inner feeling, knowing, or intuition about their life purpose. Actually, I’ve observed that often just being in communication with the soul council and knowing-feeling that one’s life has a deeper, spiritual purpose for being here on Earth, even without any more details, can make a huge difference. It gives the person a criterion by which to decide whether a particular area, work, place, or career is in accord with one’s life purpose—and if not, to leave it, without regret and without blame.
Through such divination work, I have been led to the conclusion that souls love challenges, apparently—they often do not choose an easy path. This is especially so when souls get to the point in their evolution where they realize that passively letting past karmic patterns determine our lives and our destiny is not a path of liberation. The Tibetan Buddhists emphasize that being born as a human being on Earth is a precious opportunity and we should not waste it. Perhaps this is because the greater the difficulties, the greater the learning. Any learning of anything surely involves challenges to rise above obstacles and weaknesses. How could growth take place if our lives proceeded to the tune of “roses, roses all the way”?
The Earth time-space dimension is the most restrictive and arduous of all the dimensions in which our existence unfolds. We recognize this every time we experience the dissolution of time-space and materiality when we visit the inner realms in dreams or visionary states. Our difficulty stems from the fact that a human incarnation in the time-space-matter dimension is generally more or less cut off from the awareness of its spiritual origin and essence.
This is the meaning of the teaching in the Asian spiritual traditions, both Hindu and Buddhist, that the default condition of the human being at birth is un-consciousness or non-consciousness (avidya). This Sanskrit term, literally “not-knowing,” and sometimes misleadingly translated as “ignorance” or “delusion,” refers to the nonconsciousness of the average newborn infant of their true spiritual origin, as a soul.
The soul, actually all three souls (mother, father, and child), know that once we are conceived in a fleshly womb and then born into the time-space world of earthly conditions, all bets are off, so to speak. Everything, all knowledge of our origin and mission, may be forgotten, even the existence of the soul may be denied or buried in the unconscious personality layers of mother, father, and child. That’s the challenge, the risk, the testing—and the learning.
As soon as the first step into biological form is taken, at conception, the veils of forgetting, the sheaths of conditioning, come in and layer on during the entire prenatal epoch. The amnesia culminates with great intensity at the trauma of birth, especially if this occurs with little or no consideration for the consciousness and spiritual nature of the newborn child. The processes of conditioning and forgetting continue during infancy, childhood, and the formative years, as inherited predispositions are combined with conditioned reaction patterns.
Soul memories tend to fade progressively with age. In William Wordsworth’s poem Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood, he expresses beautifully the spiritual origin of the soul and the progressive, but not complete, forgetting of the formative years:
Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting
The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
Heaven lies about us in our infancy!
And yet, at every moment of this whole process, this whole life, the possibility of remembering our true origin, and reconnecting to our soul and its purpose, arises. With conscious, spiritual conception and birthing attitudes and practices, the soul connection may be maintained, or reestablished. William Emerson and his colleagues tell the following incredible story:
A four-year-old girl kept asking to be alone with her newborn sibling. At first the parents were worried that she might harm the baby out of sibling jealousy. They finally agreed to the girl’s request, but listened via intercom from the next room. After a period of silence, they heard their daughter say to the baby, “Tell me about heaven. I’m beginning to forget.” (Linn et al., 1999, p. 31).
In my divination ritual workshops I’ve observed that sometimes, tuning in to the memory of one’s earliest experience of the bonding-gazing between newborn infant and mother can lead directly to the recognition and remembrance of the communion of two souls. On the other hand, some people, when asked to recall the first bonding-gazing experience, will remember sensing anxiety, coldness, or even hatred in the mother’s eyes. Clearly, they are then recalling a painful moment in which the soul communion was temporarily obstructed. The residues of such pain would then first need to be healed.
The passage of the soul from incarnational choice to conception and then birth may be reflected in dreams and visionary communications between parents-to-be and the child soul around the time of conception and discovery. Such dream visitations heralding a soul’s arrival are typically accompanied by deep feelings of peaceful joy, and a sense of expansive spiritual awareness.
This expansive spiritual awareness associated with conscious recognition of the arrival of a soul is the archetypal theme of the Annunciation. In Luke’s gospel story of the birth of Jesus, after the Angel Gabriel has announced to Mary that she will give birth to a “Son of the Highest,” she visits her cousin Elizabeth, who is pregnant with the future John the Baptist. Elizabeth says she feels her baby “leap in her womb.” Mary says, “My soul magnifies the Lord” (Magnificat anima mea Dominum). The Magnificat prayer has provided the text for some of the most sublime religious music in the Western liturgical tradition.
Some parents have extensive pre-birth conversations and negotiations with their child’s soul, and dream visions of that child’s future. Sometimes other relatives, like the mother’s mother, or an attendant midwife or friend, may have dream communications with the unborn child. Usually, in such dream encounters, the soul announcing its arrival is seen as a young child, or sometimes an adult, not an embryo, fetus, or infant. Such visionary encounters with the souls of unborn children confirm that, at the level of soul or essence, the outer distinctions between adult and child are irrelevant. All souls are equal in the eyes and heart of the Divine.
As numerous stories collected and recorded in the books by Elizabeth Hallett and Sarah Hinze attest, a kind of dialogue of agreement occurs around the conception, and may be recalled in dreams of the parents. Sometimes there is a clear sense of the soul choosing the parents, and parents agreeing; at other times there is negotiating, communication, and accommodating. The soul may announce its future appearance, gender, and even name. Sometimes a mother may feel unready for a birth, but insistent, repeated dream visitations from a future child fills them with peaceful, loving expansiveness and wonder.
Even the occurrence of conception, discovery, and annunciation, however, does not preclude further choices and changes. Parents may dream a child soul requesting to be accepted—and parents may accept the conception, or postpone it, or “close the womb door” to the soul applying to be born, in the language of the Bardo Thödol. After conception has occurred and an embryo begun to develop, miscarriages may still be chosen by the unborn child, and communicated in dreams to the parents, as we have seen. Miscarriage may be a soul’s choice out of compassion for the mother, in anticipation of difficult circumstances.
Some parents, especially with the newer initiatives with conscious, spiritual birthing practices, are able to maintain the conscious soul connection even through and after birth. More commonly, at some point in the pregnancy there is a separation of the transcendent soul awareness from the more limited awareness of the fetus.
A pregnant woman related having frequent empathic conversations with the adult-seeming being residing in her womb—conversations about her health concerns, diet, etcetera, like two adult friends planning a project together. After a certain point in the pregnancy, the woman suddenly began to feel alone and abandoned by her friend—until she got the message that the soul needed to concentrate on being more closely involved with the growing fetus, preparing for the potentially difficult passage of birth (Hallett, 2002, p 81).
Although the Bardo Thödol does not explicitly mention the prenatal epoch as such, we can find in the teachings of the afterdeath bardo states some suggestive parallels with findings now emerging out of the work of prenatal and past-life regression therapists and highly developed intuitives. In the phase called the bardo of seeking a new life, the traveler in the intermediate realms is repeatedly admonished to remember where he is, and that his thoughts and intentions will profoundly affect the kind of experience he or she may have in his new life.
He is told that he is not in his ordinary body, but a “mental body,” or “bardo body,” or “desire body,” which can’t be killed, but which can fly, pass through walls, and has all kinds of non-ordinary capacities. In other words, he or she is in what are also called, in esoteric traditions, the intermediate planes (astral-emotional and mental-noetic), descending step by step to the time-space material level of existence.
The soul is then reminded of the six possible lokas (worlds) of samsara (existence) into which he might find himself or herself drifting, carried along by the karmic propensities of their previous existence. Here the teachings of the Bardo Thödol converge with the teachings represented in the Wheel of Samsara with the six possible realms or states of consciousness in which we may find ourselves—after death, but also during life. Francesca Fremantle, a student of Trungpa Rinpoche, writes in her book on The Tibetan Book of the Dead:
Many Western Buddhists have difficulties with the concept of rebirth in the six realms, or even with rebirth at all. No one can prove to us what lies beyond death. However, we can investigate our minds here and now and discover all the worlds contained within. We can find out what life as a human being really means at this very moment…Trungpa Rinpoche always spoke of the six realms as states of mind, and emphasized the importance of understanding them in this way while we have the opportunity in this life (Fremantle, 2003, p. 143–144).
I discuss the six realms and the Wheel of Births and Deaths in more detail in part five, but mention here only briefly the chief characteristics and qualities of these realms—how we human beings come into these realms through our unconscious karmic tendencies, both in life and after death.
The hell realm is marked by claustrophobic feelings of suffering and victimization.
The pretas realm of “hungry ghosts” is a world of frustrated craving and unsatisfied desire, symbolized by the distended stomachs but thin mouths of the spirits in this realm.
The animal realm is a world of focusing on survival instincts—food, sex, sleep, self-preservation—with lack of aspiration for higher values.
The realm of asuras, often translated as “jealous gods” or “titans,” is a world of struggle, competition, and violence, into which we come through discontent, jealousy, and grasping envy.
The heaven world of devas is a realm of cultivating pleasure and aesthetic delight of the senses, which in the Buddhist view is a temporary state of self-indulgent satisfaction.
The human realm is described by Trungpa as “the epitome of communication and relationship,” in which there is curiosity for knowledge and aspiration for spiritual values. It has some of the qualities of all the other realms, but is less fixated and bound than those.
In the Bardo Thödol the bardo traveler is admonished to avoid being caught or driven into any of the realms, but if unavoidable, to aim intention either for the deva realm or the human realm. The human world is considered the best of the six to be born into—because it offers the “precious opportunity” of liberation and enlightenment. The remaining instructions in the bardo of rebirth phase of the afterdeath journey deal with instructions on how to first delay being born at all, and then to choose the best kind of human birth.
The guidance for the soul embarking on its journey into a new incarnation is couched as instructions on how to “close the womb-door.” The point here is to delay the rebirth as long as possible, so that one can avoid being sucked into unfavorable births by one’s unconscious karmic propensities (samskaras). The first method of closing the womb-door is to remember that you are in this bardo of rebirth and focus on positive intentions: “holding in mind one single resolution, persist in joining up the chain of good karma…this is a time when earnestness and pure love are necessary.”
The second, third, fourth, and fifth methods of “closing the womb-door” all involve different ways of responding to visions of men and women copulating. The bardo traveler is urged not to join in, although he or she may be tempted to do so. It’s as if the Buddhist masters are saying, “Do not rush into a new incarnation. Staying with conscious intention at the very beginning is more likely to lead to a more conscious human lifetime.”
I suggest that the vision of a couple copulating is the vision of one’s own conception. This existential choice point, where the soul chooses which couple to have as parents, can be reached in prenatal regression divinations, and is here arrived at from the other side, at the end of the afterlife period, when the decision to reincarnate has been made or is being made.
The Bardo Thödol says that if the voyager feels attraction to the female and aversion to the male, he will be reborn as a male; and if attraction to the male and aversion to the female, she will be born as female. As we now know from medical research, the gender of the child is determined in the earliest phases of embryonic development, and can involve all kinds of variations of genital anatomy. And as Sigmund Freud famously observed, “anatomy is destiny.” Some scientists now believe the origin of the inclination to homosexuality may be in embryonic development. These scientific findings are consistent with a view that sees homosexuality, as well as gender and its variations, as soul choices made to provide certain learning conditions for that soul in its earthly human existence.
If, even after using the various methods of preventing or postponing rebirth by meditating with conscious intention on light, and on one’s chosen deity, one is still drawn into a womb for birth, the deceased is given instructions for “choosing of the womb-door.” First there are “premonitory visions of the place of rebirth”—the continents in four directions are described, where one might be born. “All the possible places of birth will be known to you, one after another. Choose accordingly.” The soul in the bardo of rebirth is advised to use their foresight to choose a human birth in an area in which religion and ethics prevail.
To summarize, the instructions of the Bardo Thödol for the most favorable kind of rebirth are to delay the return from the light- and wisdom-filled heaven worlds as long as possible, and when the time comes, which you know by seeing the acts of conception between men and women, to choose a birth family where the likelihood of coming into contact with the dharma teachings are greatest. The ending of the interlife period is the beginning of the bardo of rebirth: the decision is made to reincarnate, in a blending of karmic tendencies and conscious choice, and conception takes place in a fleshly human womb. This rebirth phase then ends with the actual physical birth, nine months later, when we start cycling through the three bardos of waking life, dreaming, and meditating. In conclusion, below is my version of the Root Verse for the bardo of rebirth:
Now, as the bardo of rebirth dawns upon me,
I will hold one-pointedly to a single wish—
Continuously directing intention with a positive outlook.
Delaying the return to Earth-Life as long as possible.
I will concentrate on pure energy and love,
And cast off jealousy while meditating
on the Guru Father-Mother.
In chapter 3 we encountered Lailah as the guide to the after-life. In the vast literature of Jewish mystical teaching stories referred to as midrashim, there are references to the activities of an “angel of conception,” also called “midwife of souls,” which illuminate the points made here about the process of incarnation. Talmudic scholar and translator Daniel Matt pointed out to me (in a letter) that the name Lailah means “Night” in Hebrew, and that this angel is elsewhere in the Zohar identified with Gabriel. In the Christian Gospel stories Gabriel is the messenger of the Annunciation, announcing the conception of John to Zachariah, and of the Christ child to Mary.
Some versions of the story of Lailah describe reluctance or resistance of the soul to entering into human life, which seems to contradict the notion of incarnational choice. It is, however, consistent with the observation that, associated with the memory of our original abode, there is often a kind of divine homesickness or sense of alienation.
Among the angels there is one who serves as midwife of souls. This is Lailah, the angel of conception. When the time has come for conception, Lailah seeks out a certain soul hidden in the Garden of Eden and commands it to enter the seed. The soul is always reluctant, for it still remembers the pain of being born, and it prefers to remain pure. But Lailah compels the soul to obey, and that is how new life comes into being.
While the infant grows in the womb, Lailah watches over it, reading the unborn child the history of its soul. All the while a light shines upon the head of the child, by which it sees from one end of the world to the other. And Lailah shows the child the rewards of the Garden of Eden, and the punishments of Gehenna (Schwartz, 2005, p 57).
So here is the image of the soul reluctantly leaving its heavenly abode, and being sent on a mission into the world. The soul is assisted by an angelic guide, who tells it the history of its previous incarnations, and provides it with divine foreknowledge, as well as a scenario of likely consequences of good and bad actions. The guidance from the Angel Lailah even precedes the actual conception (called “entering into the seed”) and then continues during the prenatal period.
The Zohar’s version of this extraordinary tale does not mention any reluctance on the part of the soul to enter into form, but does make it clear that the soul is originally androgynous, and only becomes polarized as male or female as it descends into human form.
Rabbi Abba said: Happy are the righteous whose souls are hidden away with the Holy King before they come into the world! For so we have learned: At the moment the blessed Holy One brings forth souls into the world, all those spirits and souls comprise male and female joined as one. They are transmitted into the hands of the emissary appointed over human conception. As they descend and are entrusted to him, they separate—sometimes one preceding the other—and he deposits them into human beings5 (Matt, 2003).
Both variants of the story mention that the birth is painful, and this pain is the cause of the soul’s forgetting its origin. This is certainly consistent with the observations from the studies of the effects of birth trauma—that it causes massive amnesia.
A fascinating detail of the story involving the Angel Lailah occurs only in the version reported by Schwartz, which is said to have originated in the Babylonian period around the ninth century. After using the light above the head to show the unborn the rewards of the Garden of Eden and the punishments of Gehenna (as cited above),
when the time has come to be born, the angel Lailah extinguishes the light and brings forth the child into the world, and as it is brought forth, it cries. Then Lailah lightly strikes the newborn above the lip, causing it to forget all it has learned. And that is the origin of this mark, which everyone bears (Schwartz op. cit., p. 58).
There is a puzzle with this story. According to folklore, touching with the finger on the philtrum above the upper lip is a gesture we make when trying to remember something. I encourage the reader to try it. It makes more sense that the compassionate gesture of the Angel Lailah, the angel that guides the soul into this world, is a gesture to help us remember our origin when we are in extremis, rather than a gesture of forgetting, or closing off the connection to the higher worlds. In other words, I suggest that the philtrum is a point of remembrance, not forgetting.
When I related this puzzling observation to my friend, acupuncturist Susan Fox, she pointed out that in traditional Chinese medicine, this point at the philtrum, above the upper lip just below the nose, called Governor Vessel 26, is considered a point of “consciousness,” to be stimulated when reviving someone who is unconscious.
The Governor Vessel (which comes up the back from the tailbone, over the top of the head, the nose, and then ends under the lip) governs all the yang channels…The Conception Vessel (which comes up from the pubic bone and terminates at the lower lip) is the central yin channel. Thus, this point is said to establish the connection between heaven (yang) and earth (yin), and is also called “man’s middle,” since man (the human) is situated between heaven and earth (Deadman and Al-Khafaji, 1998, p 559).
With this unexpected confirmation from a completely different and independent system of subtle energy anatomy, I feel there is some support for interpreting the action of the Angel Lailah, the guiding angel of incarnation and conception, as setting us up with a gesture of conscious remembering, for reminding us of our true nature as souls. One could practice it that way.
Since I do not understand the Hebrew language and have only an outsider’s acquaintance with the literature of Jewish mysticism, I was naturally a bit tentative about my interpretation of this story of the Angel Lailah. I asked my old friend and mentor Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi (1924‑2014), who has long had an interest in consciousness studies, to comment on my reading of this tale. He offered the following in a letter:
The puzzle of the psyche has engaged many people. Some of them have contended that we come in as a tabula rasa, while others have contended that we enter into our bodies with some imprint from before. Finding the tale of angel Lailah, Ralph Metzner has immersed himself in the worlds of midrashic and Kabbalistic literature. His reading of this myth differs from the usual literary analysis; he is aware of the realities behind the words of the tale. It is important to understand that we always bring our ethnic and cultural imagery to our understanding of these myths. By reaching into the accounts of shamans and mystics we seek to encounter the reality behind their words. And each epistemology will bring different descriptions. Academic epistemologies tend to look at things as objects or ideas. As we enter the realm Dr. Metzner brings to this study, we begin to move from a merely conceptual epistemology to a participatory one. This requires that we imaginally regress to our own origins. In this way we are a step closer to the realization of our existence. Enjoy the journey!
This incarnational journey of the human soul—from heaven or the spirit world, into biological form at conception; then birth, growth, and development, with the attendant high probabilities of total soul forgetting in the attachments and cravings of the material sense world—all this is expressed in a poetic allegory called The Hymn of the Pearl, which is part of a Gnostic text known as The Acts of Thomas, dating from the fourth century AD.
The original name of the Gnostic poem—The Hymn of the Soul—makes clear that we are dealing with the story of the incarnational journey. We are told of a royal couple, called the “Father of Truth” and the “Mother of Wisdom,” who send their son out from the “House of the Highest Ones,” on a long and perilous journey, to find and retrieve the One Pearl, guarded by a fierce serpent. “They made a covenant with me, and wrote it in my heart, so I would not forget.”
The son is symbolic of the human soul, going out from the heaven realm of the Divine Father-Mother into a human life journey, with a contract and a mission. The son-soul has to give up his royal raiments, symbolic of the higher, etheric “light bodies,” and take on the clothing of the people in “Egypt,” symbolic of the material sense world. He gets involved with people, forgets about the dragon and the pearl, forgets he is the son of royal parents, and eats the food and drink the people give him. “Through the heaviness of their food, I fell into a deep sleep.” In other words, he becomes attached, addicted and unconscious of his true spiritual nature (avidya, in the Indian terminology). Then there is a turning point.
He receives a message from his parents—a magical letter that “rose up in the form of an eagle…that flew and alighted beside me, and became speech. At its voice and the sound of its rustling, I awoke and rose from my sleep.” The letter tells him, “Awake and rise from your sleep. Remember that you are a son of Kings and see the slavery of your life.” He remembers his mission—finding and pacifying the serpent and retrieving the pearl. He proceeds on his homeward journey, the classic return journey of the mystic seeker. The letter that had “awakened me with its voice, now guided me with its light.”
He finds again the “robe of glory, glowing with sapphires and many colors,” that he had left behind when he left his heavenly home. The multicolored robe is probably a symbolic reference to the light-fire energy field that provides him with insight and self-knowledge. “I saw it quiver all over with the movements of gnosis…As I gazed on it, the garment itself seemed to be a mirror of myself. I saw in it my whole self, and I saw myself apart—we were two entities, yet one form.”6
At any point in life we can remember that our soul made the choice to incarnate. The we can connect again to the divine guidance that is available to us and hear again its message.