January 30, 2009

• An Old Soul’s Perspective

  My early upbringing taught me that reincarnation was a false doctrine, a superstitious belief.  Consequently, I had no understanding of or explanation for many of the dreams, and “daydreams” or “visions”, I experienced when I was young.  The first culturally acceptable explanation for them that I encountered was “racial memory.”  It’s more often called genetic memory now.

  The more I thought about the genetic memory idea, the less rational it seemed.  If memories are passed along in ova or sperm, then a woman’s memories recorded in old age, after menopause, could never be transmitted.  Likewise, the memories of someone who never reproduced would not be transmitted.  Since I had memories involving both of those circumstances, I was eventually willing to accept the evidence offered by authors such as Ian Stephenson, Paramhansa Yogananda, and Elizabeth Clare Prophet, and I rejected the common superstition prevalent in my parents’ culture.

  Since my forties, two decades ago, my past life recall has been spontaneous and voluntary, not limited to dreams and occasional flashes.  That part of my life is as real and immediate to me as the memories of this body’s childhood, and in some cases even more so.  According to Michael, that kind of recall is a trait of an old soul of a certain level.  Before I’d read that, I sorta thought I was an old soul, because I remembered so much, going back so long ago.  Also, there were those people I’d run into occasionally who said they’d known me when, who told me that I was an old soul.  Something like that happens often enough, and one tends to pay attention.

  The more I read and learn about old souls, the more I can relate.  We are underachievers, slackers even.  I looked in the eyes of my newborn youngest son twenty-seven years ago, and saw an old soul looking out at me.  It was the first thing I noticed about Doug, before I bothered counting his fingers and toes.  I ran a thumb gently across the old-guy wrinkles in his little forehead, and told him to relax, mellow out, I had his back… no worries.

  But I digress, as we old people often do.  I was saying that we are slackers, underachievers, and every time I think, “slacker,” I think of Doug.  It frustrated my teachers when I was a kid, and Doug’s teachers had the same problem:  How do you motivate someone with so much potential and no urge to live up to it?  I’d advise anyone in that situation to concentrate on helping the motivated but less than gifted ones succeed, and leave the rest of us alone.  Less frustration for the teachers, less bother and fuss for us.  Of course, since the academic bureaucracy is filled with young to mature souls, they’re not likely to be so laissez faire.

  Old souls tend to be intellectually self-reliant, and also self-deprecating.  In other words, we realize we can make mistakes, and we’d rather make our own mistakes than live with the consequences of someone else’s.  We don’t mind bending the rules or making up our own rules.  We are not much interested in fads or fashions, and tend to value substance over appearance.  That all makes complete sense to me.  Fashion makes no sense.  General rules are usually arbitrary and are often inappropriate in a given set of particular circumstances.  And, just in case you’re considering arguing with me on that, don’t bother.  That way there will be less frustration for you and less fuss and bother for me.

  One particular angle in the perspective of an old soul has to do with matters we may or may not feel are important.  Each era, each culture, each tribe, has its own set of special interests.  Currently, I’m interested in obtaining broadband because my dialup connection prevents me from enjoying YouTube.  A dozen years ago, before I got on the grid and onto the web, I was interested in getting a memory upgrade for my laptop because the damn thing was always crashing.  Those things held no interest for me in ancient Egypt, the Roman Empire, or the European Middle Ages.

  I remember what was important to me back then.  In Medieval Europe, for example, I was a Penitente, and I was passionately interested in mortifying the flesh enough so that Almighty God would spare me from the Plague, but not so much that I’d swoon from loss of blood.  The general theme of, “just enough for this, but not so much that…,”  has followed me through numerous lifetimes.  I still try to stay between the hazardous extremes, it’s just a different set of hazards each time.

  Having seen so many disparate sets of temporal, cultural and/or tribal values, our perspectives on those of the here-and-now are somewhat different from the norm.  We tend to pick and choose those that have direct impact on us (such as memory chips and bandwidth) and ignore the ones such as clothing and hairstyles, trendy beliefs, or quaint popular myths.  This detachment doesn’t mean we don’t care about the world’s current concerns.  We just tend to focus on the vital ones.

  Try to forgive us if we don’t give a shit about your current obsession, because holding resentments is like taking poison and hoping the other guy dies, and carrying grudges is like trying to swim with an armload of rocks.  Those things never change.
  

  • 9:18 pm
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