Overlapping and Parallel Lifetimes

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

2

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.