Overlapping and Parallel Lifetimes

This chapter is from "Reincarnation: Past Lives and the Akashic Record" available on Amazon/Kindle.

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Overlapping and Parallel Lifetimes

“Because a fact seems strange to you, you conclude that it is not one…All science, however, commences by being strange. Science is successive. It goes from one wonder to another. It mounts by a ladder. The science of today would seem extravagant to the science of a former time. Ptolemy would believe Newton mad.”

~ Victor Hugo

To address some commonly held misconceptions that seem to have confused some readers, I want to explain about parallel and overlapping lifetimes as I understand them at this time. From the viewpoint of the Soul, which exists outside of time and space, everything is happening at once—all our lifetimes are simultaneous. There is no linear time. Just because a person assumes it is not possible to have more than one lifetime going at the same time does not mean that any Soul, hers or anyone else’s, is limited by that person’s lack of understanding. It should be no stretch at all to think that the lives of two different personalities could overlap each other by twenty years or even more—and by this I mean two persons with the same Soul. Why on earth not, since everything is simultaneous anyway and time is merely an illusion? So what if they overlapped by twenty or more years? The Soul (or Oversoul as some call it) is far more powerful and unlimited than most of us can even begin to imagine. The more experienced Souls have no trouble at all multi-tasking like that. As Albert Einstein has implied in his theory of relativity, linear time is just an illusion we have because we are on a spinning planet. It actually does not exist at all. 

     What I have realized is that the illusion of linear time just makes things more convenient here at the Earth School, so we can see “cause and effect.” This helps us grow as we learn from the choices we make, so that in seeing our results, we can make better choices in the future—an important part of our spiritual evolution. The understanding that all our lifetimes are simultaneous also helps make it easier to understand how the healing of an issue in one lifetime can affect all the others. Our individual lifetimes are all interconnected, no matter when in linear time they appear to have happened.

     Another concept that most people would rather not consider is that of parallel lifetimes. I am going to talk about that briefly. This is how I understand parallel lives presently: every time I make a major life decision, there is a fork in my life path. When I make the decision, I split into dual versions of myself in space-time. One version of me takes one path, and another takes the other. For example, the version of me that did not get a divorce in 1988 died of cancer of the breast and uterus, which simultaneously appeared in 1993. I would have lived to be only fifty-five years of age had I remained in that marriage. I know this because my Guides have told me. I had to get out of that relationship to do my spiritual work. My spiritual work would never have happened within that highly unsupportive environment. The ex-husband had successfully stopped me from doing what I was supposed to be doing with my life many times before in prior lives, which I learned only after I had left him. Although his personality is not conscious of this, at the Soul level one of his pre-agreed-upon jobs in this lifetime was to offer resistance once again so that I was forced to really stretch myself and be fiercely brave. I needed to finally learn that lesson. The lesson was doing what I came here to do no matter what—no matter how harsh the consequences of doing my mission. When it became clear that I would have to leave him to do this, I was terrified. He did make it difficult. But I finally did it—not as quickly as I now wish I had, but I did it. I dug down deep, felt the fear, and did it anyway. If I had not felt fear, the action would not have been courageous at all. Courage is not the absence of fear. Courage is feeling the fear and doing it anyway. And do not kid yourself, either, when the fork comes and you need to make a decision—not making a decision is also a decision. You have just made the decision by default. Not deciding is like not showing up for a soccer game you are scheduled to play. When you do not show up, you are deciding to lose that game.

     There was a decision to be made, a fork in the road, and this time I took the more difficult one. It has made an enormous difference. In this parallel lifetime, the one I am in right now—the one I am writing from within—I had a lump in my breast and a large polyp displaying high density dysplasia located on my uterine cervix which appeared simultaneously in early 1993. But because this version of me had left the marriage and chosen to walk my spiritual path, neither of these turned out to be malignant. I had them surgically removed within a couple of weeks of each other, took pain pills for a while, and kept on living. As a result, I not only get to do this amazing work in the world, I got to attend both my sons’ weddings and welcome my first grandchild into the world. And who knows what else awaits me!

     This is just one example of a fork and the results of the two decisions. There have been others. We all have them—several in each lifetime. Each time that occurs, my understanding is that a parallel lifetime is created. The timeline splits, or replicates itself like a cell dividing. The Universe is big enough to handle all of these parallel timelines. It is infinite. Since they are far more fully aware than our personalities, the Oversouls, Higher Selves, and the Guides do not have a problem with this business of overlapping or parallel lives. Parallel and overlapping lifetimes will maximize the Soul’s growth experiences, since we are learning from multiple experiences of life and multiple choices all at once. It is rather like taking several classes at the same time, rather than just one per semester.

     There are different understandings of parallel lives, and one of them states that there are many versions of Cleopatra or George Washington in different versions of Earth, and that different Souls inhabit each different version of each of us. I do not resonate with this explanation, but I offer it here because there are many who believe this is why several people may claim to be Napoleon or Saint Teresa. I believe they share the same Monad, which is a ball of light like the Higher Self and Oversoul, only more elevated, from which many Oversouls are descended, just as Higher Selves come from the Oversouls. Because these Souls are all related via the Monad, they are spiritually connected to these well-known personalities and can access their memories as though they were their own. 

     A fascinating example of parallels that I will share with you is going to require that you just read it and either accept or not accept what this man told me happened to him. I believe it, but you must use your own discrimination. I have a former energy medicine client who is now a friend, Todd, who has had three near-death experiences in his sixty-five years on the planet. The first one, when he was twenty-seven years of age, happened as he was driving over a very long bridge in Louisiana. He went into the Light and was told many things, one of them being that he was not finished with this lifetime and needed to go back to accomplish certain things. Right after he left the Light and headed back toward his body, Todd became aware of five parallel lifetimes, or five versions of himself. All had been involved in the same type of horrific car accident he’d just had, and two versions of the accidents were far worse than the others. In the worst two accidents, Todd had died permanently. Yet he and two other surviving versions were returning to their bodies simultaneously. He noticed that his own version of the body was seriously damaged, so he decided to slip over into one of the less-damaged versions. He almost made it, but at the last second was jerked back over into his original body. 

     Todd spent a year convalescing in the hospital. I recount this just to let you know that some people have actually seen their parallels. Prior to that experience almost forty years ago, Todd, at that time a professional scuba diver who worked mostly around oil rigs located in the sea, had never heard of nor considered the notion of parallel selves or parallel lives. 

     Now the following part of Todd’s experience is rather hard to accept, but I know him and believe him. Feel free to just let it go if you do not. It this is too much to accept, it is okay. Do not worry if you cannot accept everything I write here. Just let what you cannot accept be like a twig in the river. If you don’t like that twig, let it float past you. If you stay on the river, you may find that you end up with a collection of nice new twigs you do like, but please don’t feel you have to collect them all. They are just concepts, after all. You certainly do not have to accept each of them to accept some of them. So, here goes…one time just after that near-death experience I mentioned, Todd was daydreaming and found himself briefly inside the consciousness of one of the other Todds whom he had seen while returning to his body after the car wreck. When this occurred, our Todd was walking through an airport carrying a bag. The other Todd was walking through a sunny meadow carpeted with flowers. Our Todd could not see the inside of the airport for a minute or two, only the field of flowers, as if he were actually there in the meadow. 

     Todd snapped back to attention when a man walking toward him in the airport gasped loudly. Apparently while being immersed inside the field-of-flowers-Todd’s consciousness, our Todd had walked straight through a concrete pillar supporting the roof of the airport. The bags he was carrying went through the pillar with him, too. At first, Todd glanced at the shocked-looking man who was staring at him, smiled, and kept on walking. Only when he looked back at the man did he realize that he had walked through the three-foot-wide cement pillar. He quickly decided that it would not be a good idea to hang around and try to explain what had happened. How could he explain? What would he say? 

     The quantum physicists do say this kind of thing is possible, if we could only figure out how to do it. Todd has never done this since. It was just a fluke. But many other people who have had NDEs also report extremely strange occurrences afterward.

     Quantum physics and its mechanics actually allow for all the things I have mentioned, including reincarnation, parallel realities and walking through solid objects, but most people are completely unaware of the scientific advances in understanding of the past hundred years. The consciousness of the average person in Western civilization is gridlocked at the level of understanding held by the scientific community of a hundred years past. In addition, most people, even scientists, still believe that empiricism is the only way to prove if something is real or true. 

     For those who do not know, scientific empiricism goes something like this. You measure and observe something, posit a theory or hypothesis about it, create an instrument or plan to test the hypothesis, conduct the test, collect the data from the test, and then statistically analyze that data so you can draw a conclusion from that data which is then assumed to be true. If it is good research, some other scientist can do the same exact thing you did and get the same results. This works well for certain things but, in actuality, this is a limited approach. Many things are real, we know they are real, and yet they cannot be empirically tested, proven and, most especially, they cannot be replicated. The most obvious example would be the existence of love, or the appearance of a “ghost.” For some of us, this also includes the existence of the Soul and the Creator—at least for now. My intuitive sense is we will soon discover another way of proving reality beyond empiricism. For the time being, however, we must trust in our experiences. And why would we not trust our own experience? Reality is true, whether the scientific community currently accepts it as true yet or not. 

     Albert Einstein once said imagination is more important than knowledge. I believe the reason he said this was because he was fully aware that knowledge—scientific or otherwise—is constantly being updated. We learn more all the time. Scientific knowledge is not static. Imagination helps us grow the body of knowledge. Scientists without an active imagination could never try new experiments. They would just replicate the experiments of others, and human knowledge and progress would come to a standstill. But that is not a problem for us right now. In fact, at this point in time, knowledge is increasing at a faster rate than ever before in our known history. It is truly impossible to keep up with it all. The best way to cope with that level of uncertainty is to remain wildly open-minded. Consider everything while exercising discrimination.

Endorsement: Guggenheim Fellow & Poet Joy Harjo

"Lois Wetzel is the tradition of the mystic, healing seer Edgar Cayce when it comes to accessing the Akashic Records, the stories of our lives through time. She assists with storytelling of the most profound kind. Her gift of opening this door and following the stories enables breakthroughs and understanding of our place here on this Earth. She facilitates deep healing, and is of the best Akashic Records healers of our time."

Joy  Harjo, poet, musician, writer and performer

Meltdown Over an Actor!

This is from a series of single lifetimes in one chapter of my latest book, "Reincarnation: Past Lives and the Akashic Record."  Doing this reading was very powerful for me. It also reminded me once again that what my personality thinks is not necessarily what is going to be in the Akashic Records. This is one of the five past lives that I saw for this client, but the most important, since it showed up first.

Meltdown Over an Actor
The next past life I wish to discuss involves a strange yet overwhelming reaction a woman had to seeing a certain actor in a video. Here is the letter she initially sent to me.

Dear Lois,

     I only have one specific question, and it pertains to someone I don't know personally but had a very intense experience connected to him, so much so that it is what pushed me request a reading with you. I'll try to make the explanation as brief as I can. The person is an actor. (She named the actor, but I will leave that out.) He is an actor I recognize by sight but could not remember his name, what I'd seen him in or even the sound of his voice. There was no strong connection at all.
     However a few weeks ago I saw him briefly in a music video and felt an instant, intense desire and longing. Over the next few days, the feelings intensified to the point that I felt there was more than hormones going on here. I could not stop thinking about him, it was misery. I also felt an increasing nervous energy that made it almost impossible for me to sleep or to focus on anything. To keep it short, this all culminated several days later in my crying. Now I've cried uncontrollably before, but this was different…like a tsunami. I had no control of my body; I felt more like an observer as I heard myself wailing at the top of my lungs. It felt like these wails were being torn out of my chest, out of my heart. I woke up everyone in the house. And when it was done....I felt fine. The nervous energy was gone.
     In its place though, was a great feeling of complete love for this person. It felt unconditional, eternal. I have never been in love or anywhere close to it so this was completely new. I also felt heartbreaking sadness—the feeling of loving someone and knowing you cannot see them, that they have to go away and you have to let them go. It was horrible. I barely ate for a week, and only got out of bed when I had to. It was like someone had died or left me. I now somewhat have my appetite back, and this guy is not triggering such strong feelings in me anymore. But there are still these up-swellings of sadness (like now, writing this email)
     I work with an energy healer, and she said that whatever happened, it had cleared out something in my heart area and allowed me to feel a type of love I could not before. I really believe that. I feel it was a positive experience but also kind of like a punch in the face—it was so intense and inexplicable. I feel like a crazy person. I would just really like to know if there is any connection between me and this actor, and if so, anything else I need to know or that needs to be healed.
     Thank you for doing this reading for me (and reading all of this email!). I look forward to whatever information or advice you and the guides have for me.

Sincerely,

Amanda Zimms

Lois’ Note: My first reaction was to wonder if this woman were simply another nut-case obsessing over an actor. But before I went into trance I carefully set that notion aside and focused my effort on remaining neutral so I could do an objective reading. What I saw stunned me.

Paralyzing Restraint

Out of the four lifetimes which I saw for Amanda that day, there was just one which was relevant to the actor she mentioned. It was the first past life that showed up for her, which indicated that the Guides and Guardians believed it to be most important for her to know. Here is the actual transcription of the reading:

“The first thing I am seeing is that you are in some sort of boat, but it does not look like any water craft that I have ever seen before.  In this life they are showing me first, I am seeing a round boat skimming along the top of the water. You are on top of what looks like a gigantic lily pond with lotuses and other water lilies. The water is just full of plants and this boat is designed to do the least amount of damage to the plants as it glides along the surface. It is much like the swamp boats they have in Louisiana that skim the water. This vehicle is shaped much like a saucer. It is a shallow, partial dome which has some sort of mechanism at the back. There is not a propeller, but the propulsion mechanism pushes air out and that causes the forward movement.
     You are sitting cross-legged atop some cushions or folded blankets inside this thing which is large enough to hold five or six people. It does not have any chairs; it is just curved sheet metal and appears as though it was hammered into the curved shape by hand. It is quite lovely, and looks like a work of art actually. It is made of copper. Interesting. It is gorgeous—like a sculpture. Sorry—I am just fascinated with this object.  So anyway, you are sitting cross-legged in the bottom of this boat, and now I am seeing that there is another person in the boat with you, a child. Also there is a man operating the controls at the back, turning the air-blowing mechanism left to right like a tiller on the back of a sailboat. I am hearing that this was a culture which predated ancient Egypt and some of the people who started Egypt—I mean the ancient Egyptian culture with the Pharaohs and everything—they came from this civilization. I am being told it is not Atlantis. A lot of people came from Atlantis to start the Egyptian culture just before Atlantis sank under the water, but this was another group from elsewhere…who joined them, and that no one seems to know about. They came from (pause) oh, I see now, they came from North America. It was an Atlantean Outpost in North America, but their culture was different. They brought certain things to the mix that people from Atlantis did not bring, so that is where this water-transiting device and these people came from. I am actually seeing you in North America but it was so long ago I did not even recognize it. It is near the East coast and it was very tropical then...the Southeast Coast. Near where the Carolinas are now. There was a huge lake there at that time not far from the ocean, but inland, and this is what you are scooting across—this lake. 
     Now I see…you are on your way to a temple…you and your husband have been told that your child…Oh, this is not what I was expecting…your child has been identified by the prophets and the seers and the priests and virtually everybody at the temple, as a reincarnation of a very famous religious leader. They would not have called him a priest or a monk, but devoted to the temple like that, but without the celibacy. Your child was that reincarnation, or they were pretty sure your child was he—and he was being taken to the temple so they could test him. This was because if indeed he was a reincarnation of that monk, your child would need to go live at the temple.  You were just hoping and praying that he was not, because you did not want your little three and a half or four year old child taken away from you. However, you knew that was how it was when there was a reincarnation of someone special like that. Naturally, you were crying, trying not to let your child see you cry. Finally you three arrived at the temple which was on a little island inside of this very broad lake. The island was surrounded by lotus plants and other water lilies. This was not an extremely deep lake, but it did cover a lot of territory
     Upon arrival at the temple, you were greeted, honored and housed in a very beautiful place, much nicer than anything you lived in while these religious officials took your child to test him to see if indeed he is the person who they think he is. You were wined and dined, and treated like royalty while this process was going on. It goes on for three days. At the end of three days you were called inside the temple.
     There was a ceremony in which you discovered your child was being retained at the temple to be trained, since he was indeed the reincarnation of the famous religious leader. This small boy was your only child, and you had waited  such a long time to have this baby; there was difficulty with your fertility. This was an unspeakable loss for you. Sadly, the rules required that you be very calm and collected and not get upset in front of your child, because he did not need to be any more traumatized than being separated from his parents was going to cause him anyway. This group had been doing this kind of thing—separating children from their mothers—for thousands of years so they knew from trial and error the best way to do this.
     Temple personnel had counseled that if you were going to cry, you should wait until you got home. Unfortunately, since you were an extremely emotional person who was also a very good mother that was extremely hard for you. Struggling intensely to control your feelings, you forcefully stuffed the emotions. When the ceremony was over, you hugged your child, told him you loved him and you would come back to see him once a year as you were allowed to do. You repeated to him that it was a big honor for him to be here, and you would miss him very much, but this was where he needed to be. None of you—not you, not your husband, and certainly not your small child—had any choice in the matter. This was just the way it was done in that culture. After the ceremony you went home again in that strange-looking, beautiful copper boat across the water to your home. For countless hours, you sat rigidly staring straight ahead, silently forcing yourself not to cry, and therefore never really let the tears out.
     To maintain control of your life, you stuffed all your feelings for this little boy; all that pain was locked away inside. You did have two more children, and they were both girls.  You were never the same after this loss of the boy, though, it was so deeply traumatizing to you. You went back once a year to see him and were very formal with him because he was a very special person. Each time you went there and saw him you were afraid that you were going to break down and sob uncontrollably, but you took a vow that you would not do that, and in that particular lifetime you would never, ever cry again.
     Your precious son was about thirty years old when you saw him for the last time. After you went home you passed away from a heart attack; it was sudden and you died without ever having grieved over losing this little boy whom you had loved so deeply. This was, after all, your first child and only son. Added to that, you had known him in other lifetimes. As an adult at about thirty, he looked almost identical to the actor you mentioned. The actor is not a reincarnation of your son, but he looked almost exactly like him. In fact, they may be ancestrally related.  Your son could be an ancestor of the actor, but that is beside the point. The actor was not actually the person you were involved with in that past life, but what seeing that video did for you was that it allowed you to finally grieve over losing your little boy. You just gut-sobbed, screamed, and allowed yourself to feel that pain in your heart and soul stuffed away for so long. It happened so you could finally let go of all that you had tragically been carrying from lifetime to lifetime.
     The experience of seeing that video was set up as a trigger, so you could finally release all that pain and grieve the loss of the child. That is what that experience was seeing him in that particular—there was something about that particular movie or video—that triggered the memory.
     That is all you need to know about that lifetime.

A few days later I wrote to Amanda:

Dear Amanda,

     I am wondering if you might allow me to write about your past lives reading in my next book. Yours was an unusual request for the past life information, and I think it could benefit many others to learn about this kind of experience you had after seeing the video—to even know that this kind of thing can happen to a person. I would change your name and all identifying information, including the name of the actor.
     Please let me know how you feel about this, and also please know that it is okay if you do not want me to share your story.

Luminous Blessings,
Lois J Wetzel

She answered the same day:

Dear Lois,

     I would be happy to let you include my reading in your book. When I initially wrote to you with my request, I wondered if you'd ever had a client come to you with a similar story. It was such a weird experience, and kind of embarrassing to talk about. I was afraid it would be interpreted as someone simply becoming infatuated with a celebrity and deciding, of course, they must have had a past life history together! So, I can't overstate how grateful I am that you were able to give me an answer and a reason for what I experienced. 
     The original incident occurred when I saw the music video with (the actor) in it happened last June, and it took me about four weeks to feel mostly back to normal. I actually could tell that the past life reading was about to happen because two days beforehand, I started to feel very anxious and the old feelings of sadness started welling up again. After listening to the reading for the first time I was pretty much a wreck for the rest of the day! I've been feeling a little better every day, but I did not expect the feelings of grief and loneliness to come on so strongly after listening to the reading. Even writing this is tough. There is something unspeakably difficult about losing someone without having the consolation of actually remembering them...remembering all the good times and experiences. When the grief passes you are supposed to still have all those good memories that keep the person alive in your heart, so to speak.  It never occurred to me how horrible it would be to not have that, to just have the pain. There is this awful feeling of losing someone twice over. It's hard to describe.
      As far as the video is concerned, I think there was something important about me seeing that actor in motion. Photos did not have the same effect on me. I think I needed to see his expressions, his energy, to shake something loose in my mind. I rarely watch music videos, but of course some innocuous chain of events led to me watching this particular one. What is interesting is that even though that actor is playing the part of a villain the moment he appeared on screen I felt the attraction. All I saw was his smile, and his eyes, and the laugh lines around his eyes. I actually felt a strong electric current go up my legs, through the soles of my feet, so strong it made my legs jerk. The image that stayed in my mind was of that sweet smile and those eyes, which seemed like the most beautiful eyes I'd ever seen, a rich brown that almost seemed to glow. When I went back to re-watch the video though, I realized that although he did smile, it was never that sweet smile I had fixed in my mind, and it was impossible to tell in video whether his eyes were brown or black, the lighting was too dim. Those details were so seared into my mind though, and with such a loving feeling, I couldn't understand why I would "remember" such clear details that didn't exist. It was like I was superimposing something that wasn't there. That was a big clue to me that something funny was going on
     I'm actually feeling a lot better now that I've written all this. Evenings (er, I guess it's early morning now) are when the sad feelings really take over, but writing this wall of text has helped! Anyway, thank you again so much for doing the reading for me, it's given me peace of mind and is helping to release all these awful feelings. Once I get past all of that I hope I will start to see how my life is changed for the better. There is no doubt in my mind that this grief has been seriously blocking my ability to connect with others from my heart on a truly deep level. I'd never previously experienced the kind of unconditional love I felt when I started grieving for this lost son. It makes it hard to let go, because I know as the sadness goes away so will the feeling of love, and it is so much stronger than anything I've felt before. But I hope this means I will someday be able to feel it for someone else, who is actually here in this life.

Sincerely,
Amanda Zimms

This was my reply to Amanda:

Dear Amanda,

     Of course, I feel certain that the immense overwhelm is because of how very long the grief has been stuck and unexpressed. I believe it is good to do the grieving loud and long. This will actually heal your DNA (where our connections to past lives are—in part). Please go to my website www.HotPinkLotus.com and then on to the newsletter page and read "The Orchidium," channeled from the Hathors by Tom Kenyon. That newsletter is dated in July of 2013. The Orchidium is a technique for assisting with overwhelming feelings, and drawing in more sustenance to the energy body from the cosmos—great for when we are going through a rough patch, or have low energy.
     Once you finish with the integration of this past life, and the grieving is all done, you will still love your little boy, albeit in a spiritual way. By that I mean it will seem more "subconscious" than anything else.  The love is eternal. He is soul family. You are right about this: the important piece is that you will be healed deeply, and all kinds of profound love possibilities will open up for you.
     If writing this letter made you feel better, I highly recommend you keep a journal about your experiences with integrating all these past lives. Writing can be highly therapeutic, and you write really well.

Blessings,
Lois

Ohio Boy Remembers Past Life

More and more parents are actually listening to their children (eventually!) as they talk about their past lives. Here is yet another example of this. This small boy remembered a past life as a woman in Chicago who died in a hotel fire. They both love(d) Stevie Wonder's music.