About two years before I began working on this book with Jordan, he shared the following through channeled writing.
The current of time appears constant. We seem further from the source and more alone as one by one our loved ones leave the river.
But time flows only within the banks. The villages we live in between lives are above the river, outside of time. We enter time to forget, to believe the river is all there is, cold and deep and rolling. We can enter the river anywhere — from the headwaters to the mouth. From the Stone Age to this world’s end. Time receives us, takes us, teaches us — till at the end of each life we drown. Over and over.
Time was invented by consciousness to measure change. We enter time to change, to grow wiser and stronger in the water. Whatever we learn is taken back to the village, to the place where we are all becoming god.
As the progress of the book moved forward, I found myself returning to his message, hoping to gain a clearer sense of these villages outside of time.
Soul Groups
I ask Jordan, When do we get to join with all the people we love?
When we leave time and return to the spirit world, the illusion of aloneness and loss ends. As soon as possible, we reunite with loved ones. While there is a vast network of billions of souls, we actually live in small communities.
The people in each soul group (five to twenty souls) are a family who metaphorically reside in one of the “houses” in the community. Neighbors who live in houses up and down the block and on nearby streets are often very close and support one another. And, of course, in each “town” everybody knows everybody.
Since we live in small communities, we often have many relationships — some of them long and deep — with “soul friends” outside of our immediate soul group (house/family). Sometimes we even form relationships to souls in distant groups, as we do on Earth to people in distant cities. Connections to souls in faraway groups are usually forged during incarnations, and the love may be very strong — as between soldiers from different places who forge deep bonds in war.
In the life between lives, neighbor groups often congregate in “block parties” for shared recreation, “town meetings” to explore an issue of mutual interest, or “lectures” from a master who has perspectives to offer souls at a certain point in development. Souls in the neighborhood are often at a similar spiritual level, in much the same way incarnates live in communities where everyone has a similar socioeconomic status. There’s a reason for this. Across the many billions of souls, there’s a huge range in level of development. Souls at various levels of consciousness see existence through the lens of different memes (assumptions, values), so we tend to congregate with those who have a similar perspective. The point is that we hang with our buddies — those with whom we share a common bond — both here and in the life between lives.
Soul groups are essentially seminars, led by guides/teachers, that go on for millennia. Much soul-group class work involves study of the Akashic Record — parsing the intricate patterns of cause and effect as experienced by everyone involved in an event. Souls are learning to be historians, working on the eternal question “How did this happen?” The answer is in the record: including the state of mind of each soul involved in the event, the moment of each choice, and how the laws of change [which will be explored next] flow through unfolding scenarios. As souls learn about the past in their study groups, they are instantly there, witnessing. They see everything in the moment it happened.
Soul-group classes learn how to use the laws of change on Earth so they can alter cause-and-effect forces during future lives. Nelson Mandela is an example of someone who was an expert at using the laws of change on Earth. Instead of seeking revenge after years of imprisonment, he sought national reconciliation. His response was so unexpected, so anomalous, that it elevated the consciousness of many souls in South Africa and around the world. He did that by using energy patterns that interrupt habitual ways of seeing and reacting to abuse.
When a person is harmed, the usual response is to (1) get angry, (2) get power, and (3) get retribution — to harm whoever has caused the damage. Laws of change are counterforces to cause and effect. They involve souls doing and saying strategic things to alter predictable outcomes.
The more advanced a soul group is, the more advanced this training is. Souls start by learning to make small changes in the expected response (for example, raising an eyebrow instead of frowning), which will alter a single interaction. Advanced use of the laws of change can alter the course of history.
At times, life-between-lives training involves travel. Souls take archaeological tours of the past to study less-developed universes. These tours help us see where consciousness has come from, and they allow us to glimpse, at this moment, the level to which it has evolved. Such training also explores the nature of consciousness: what its powers are and what it can create. We study how consciousness seeks truth and how once it does, it can create laws, relationships, objects, and even a universe to reflect that truth. Our universe is mostly dark, composed of truth that is not yet seen. But as collective consciousness becomes more advanced, each succeeding universe we create becomes more light, more seen, more self-aware.
The work of souls between lives is constant learning, constant growth. Each truth that we learn — whether about our last life, the laws of change, or how consciousness evolves — brings a form of ecstasy. It is the feeling of seeing more clearly, more precisely, what is and what can be. This feeling is very similar to the feelings that we experience as embodied souls when we witness great beauty. The poet John Keats was right: seeing beauty and seeing truth produce almost the same emotion.*
While we are a part of all collective consciousness, our primary sense of belonging is to our group, soul friends, and guides. Those are the souls we long for during each incarnation. We are overjoyed at finding them — both during life and on returning to the spirit world. Conversely, the loss of these souls, through death, can trigger deep grief and aloneness.
How does our soul group connect to us on Earth? I ask.
During our embodied life, souls from our life-between-lives neighborhood show up in various relationships and roles, including but not limited to:
• influential teachers
• nurturing grandparents
• siblings, parents, or children
• lovers or life partners
• friends, enemies, or foils
• colleagues or mentors
• objects of unrequited love
• lost loves
• competitors
• favorite bartenders
• doctors, therapists, advisers, violin teachers
Members of soul groups, neighboring groups, and special souls from distant groups agree to show up at a given time and place on Earth (or other planets). In advance, they sign up for roles in an ongoing series of plays, with relationships and scenarios already shaped by long chains of cause and effect. In truth, they aren’t agreeing to a single drama, but to a part in a production that began years before their birth and will continue long after they’ve left the stage. Each relationship — with likely challenges seen in advance — is designed to provide karmic lessons.
So souls show up, like beacons during life, to guide us, to offer lessons we planned in the life between lives, and to challenge us with adversity. Souls recognize others from their group and neighboring groups, as well as soul friends, by energy — complementary vibrational patterns. This is akin to old friends making an old, familiar joke on reuniting, or a well-known voice murmuring hello. These familiar, usually recognized, energy patterns create sudden trust and a desire to connect. But they can also be dangerous. Members of our own or neighboring groups who have gone off the rails in a particular life can do enormous damage to us on Earth because we let them in without the normal caution or defenses.
While our roles in this world are largely assigned, the choices we make during each life are our own. And how these relationships play out may be nothing like what we planned during the life between lives. We may reject someone who was meant to be a life partner, fail to recognize a soul meant to be a dear friend, or alienate a child who is in our soul group. So while the roles and relationships are anticipated, the outcomes depend on us.
Each significant incarnate relationship remains a part of the soul relationship forever. The feelings, lessons, and love forged in that life cannot be extinguished by time or later incarnations.
So if two souls were father and son in one life, as you and I were, that connection becomes an indelible aspect of what the souls share?
Soul relationships can’t be lost. In each life these bonds get strengthened as souls forge new roles and face new challenges. Souls who are deeply connected in the spirit world are a band of brothers and sisters who will never stop loving one another, though one may bedevil another in any given life. When souls are reunited after death and can finally see past a single existence to remember their hundreds of shared lives, all that’s left is love. The hurts are gone. The disappointments are gone. Family is what matters.
Life between lives is different from the Christian notion of heaven. In traditional Christian doctrine, the afterlife is a place where souls see god as their reward for a life well spent. This communion with god allows them to download, for all eternity, his wisdom, knowledge, and grace.
And is that how it works? I ask. Do you see god?
Not really. In the life between lives, souls do not see god; they don’t bathe in the light of a supreme being, or source. Instead they learn from guides and masters who are more advanced.
There’s a hierarchy among souls in the life between lives, but it isn’t based on worth or status. It’s based instead on attained level of consciousness. At higher levels of consciousness you can do things you can’t do at lower levels, such as changing the course of events in South Africa, creating living beings, or inventing new laws for a new universe. We do not see god because all of consciousness is god. And we are each a little part of it.
This discussion makes me wonder about other traditional concepts, like whether we are fated in this life to join soul mates.
This is a myth. Even though incarnated souls join in sexual relationships, and across lifetimes the same two souls may choose to reconnect again and again as partners, souls in a neighborhood will explore many different roles and relationships during countless incarnations. Those who’ve chosen to be husband and wife in one life are likely to have other life-between-lives “neighbors” with whom they’ve also shared a sexual relationship. Monogamy doesn’t exist in the spirit world. Each relationship, each incarnated role, is entered for the purpose of learning. Rules such as fidelity — while important mores on Earth — have no bearing in the spirit world, where each soul has had countless partners from the “neighborhood.”
Choosing the Next Life
The last major thing we do during each sojourn in the life between lives is to choose a new life. Though we may be given several options by guides who help us decide, each path is expected to teach karmic lessons as yet unlearned in past lives. The chosen life may also provide balance. An incarnation marked by loss and helplessness may be followed by a life with greater choices. A life of extreme violence may be followed by one of relative quiescence. A life in which we have done harm may lead to a subsequent life in which we are victims.
As I think about Jordan’s choice of his life with us, it exemplifies both the process of balancing and the role of a karmic lesson plan. In his previous life, Jordan told me, he had alcoholic parents, both prone to sudden bursts of violence. Throughout that childhood he lived in fear. As a young adult in that incarnation, Jordan was impulsive and restless. He became a bootlegger, using the threat of violence to control others and protect himself. Because of these activities, he lived in fear of the police. Shortly before the repeal of Prohibition, Jordan invested in a legitimate business. Things quieted down, but his life as a merchant was less successful than his whiskey-running days.
Jordan then sought balance in his next incarnation (his life with us). Though he feared anger and had a phobia of the police, he found safety in his life with us. We observed that he took opportunities to develop competence and self-discipline, and he displayed none of the impulsiveness of his bootlegger life. He developed an appreciation for natural beauty, where he also found peace. But there remained karmic lessons and debts. Three times in his life as Jordan, he was a victim of violence — and karmic forces, unknowable to me, were at work on the night he died.
Jordan said he knew his life with us would be a short one. In our soul community, we all knew it. Though it is hard for me to believe I signed up for this — losing my boy — everything I know about the life between lives suggests we walk knowingly, deliberately, into our next life.
Jordan says:
Our last moments before incarnating can be poignant. It’s hard to leave the spirit world because everyone is there. It is only in time that we have sadness, the illusion of separation, the apparent loss of the ones we know. Only in time do the wolves come — that image of abandonment, a lonely death — to devour us. Only in time do we know fear — the gleaming eyes of animals waiting in the dark.
Yet out there, just beyond the last breath, is everyone. We have just forgotten. It is their eyes gleaming in the dark.
* “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,” from John Keats, “Ode on a Grecian Urn”; see www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/173742.