Your Soul is trying to fulfill a mission. What is that mission? How was this mission chosen? And how can you make sure you optimise your chances of completing your mission in this lifetime?
Watch the video as well!
Soul journeys
Many cultures around the world accept the idea that we humans are Souls who have incarnated as material beings for a purpose. The immaterial part of us has chosen to create a material, physical opportunity for expression. A consistent thread to this idea is that Souls can incarnate many times, each life being a new possibility. In between one death and the next life, our Soul has the space to review what has been left behind, and consider what improvements might be made when we create a new life. Mostly, Jews, Christians and Muslims believe there is only one opportunity – this life you are leading right now. But reincarnation as a real possibility is built in to the Eastern religious traditions, especially for Buddhists and Hindus.
Ancient wisdom
The Greek philosopher, Plato, living around two and half thousand years ago, inherited his ideas from earlier teachers. He had been a student of Pythagoras, who was a healer and a mystic, not just a mathematician, interested in theorems. Pythagoras had spent time in Egypt and had also been visited by a shaman from the Far East. This shaman was called Abaris (meaning ‘Skywalker’) and he had come to find Pythagoras to give him a golden arrow, in recognition of his divine destiny as an incarnation of the god Apollo.
Ancient inscriptions describe how Pythagoras was recognised as a pholarchos… a lord or master of dreams. He and his followers encouraged trance states, possibly by using plant medicines, but notably by spending time in ‘incubation’ – sleeping in a dark, secluded place. We would describe this as sensory deprivation. We modern seekers don’t spend time in underground caves like the Greeks. However, you might well attend a workshop and lie on the floor under a blanket, close your eyes and make an inner journey, usually guided by a teacher.
Dream Knowledge
The ancients understood that dreams are the source of wisdom and knowledge. When we understand this gift, we realise that our Western philosophers wanted to transmit real wisdom. Unfortunately, it was Plato himself, and his own student Aristotle, who failed to carry forward this magical advantage. Later philosophers – too many to mention here – also failed to understand the wisdom that Pythagoras was bringing into our culture. But Plato learned something from Pythagoras about the journey of the Soul. Possibly, Pythagoras learned what he knew from Egyptian priests, or from the Mongolian shaman, Skywalker. Perhaps he recalled his own Soul’s journey during one of his incubations. Whatever the source of this knowledge, Plato explained it in Book Ten of The Republic.
Choosing our destiny
Plato describes how some of the old heroes choose to be reborn as birds, or other non-human creatures. This is not a punishment, but a choice. It’s a very beautiful passage to read, in which the soul of Orpheus chooses to become a swan, while a swan chooses to become a human. Atalanta chooses to become a male athlete. Odysseus spends a long time looking for the life of a private and obscure man, because he doesn’t want to be burdened with so much ambition. Animals turned into humans, and into other animals, and the other way round… the unjust into the fierce, and the just into tame animals, and there were many possible combinations.
Setting up your Divine Contract
I call the arrangements we made before being born a ‘Divine Contract’. Plato has much more to tell us about what happens before we actually get born, but I’ll save that for the next blog – all about the daimon, otherwise known as your guiding angel.
To discover more about your own personal Divine Contract and how you can enable your Soul to best fulfill its requirements, you could explore my course, Grounding Your Life Purpose, either as Self-Study or with personal supervision from me. There are currently Special Offers on both versions of the course.