Past Lives & Astrology: The Soul Knows No Time
A friend and I were considering attending a talk recently on karma and past lives. She asked me if I thought if spending a lot of time thinking and talking about past lives might be counterproductive. Does it keep you from the here and now? Can you use it to distract yourself from the present? Is being in that mode a kind of addiction to therapy that can keep you from healing, choosing to heal?
The potential benefits of therapies exist outside of how we use them. You can respect a modality and encounter a practitioner of it that makes you think twice about trusting it. The juice is in how it’s used. I do think about past lives a lot, it’s my work. But if they’re made useful to present tasks of healing, there’s nothing wrong with thinking and talking about them a lot. I can speak for how I use them in my work: To understand the present, we have to understand the past. The goal of the work is in helping you live here and now, but if you’re using the past to keep you from the here and now (which we all have done and many of us actively do), we have to talk about the past to learn how be here now, which is learning to move on.
Here’s something: The soul knows no time. You come into any given life with a soul agenda, and you will create circumstances to give you the opportunities to experience the themes listed on that agenda. The multidimensional nature of the symbols (that, for instance, Mars is aggression/violence as well as defense/rescue; Saturn is the burden of hard work as well as achievement/recognition once hard work is done) means that the themes on the soul’s agenda can be studied and checked off the list, so to speak, in many different ways.
What I’d like you to hear today is this: You are reliving your past lives right now.
Right now, the fears you’re learning to either heed or heal can be traced to a past life.
The joys and passions you’re presently expressing and craving to express can be traced to a past life.
Each life is an opportunity to experience the desires and heal the wounds of the soul.
Whatever themes your chart reflects, learning to understand your deepest desires, intentions and fears takes you closer to consciously understanding the journey of your soul. Healing something now is healing something that exists outside time. When you shift (heal) your perception about the circumstances of your life, you increase the level of restfulness of your soul. And the more restful is your soul, the more you will be inclined to figure out how to bring your deepest gifts to the world.
Which is what I guarantee you your soul truly wants to do.
That’s the foundation goal of my work as a karmic astrological counselor (there has to be a more manageable term! I’ve been called a “soul doctor,” but that doesn’t even really cover it). People in all stages of the journey to getting to know their souls come in, and I do what I can to address the needs of the stage they’re in, whatever it is in the moment they sit down with me. Some people need to be recognized or seen at the soul level, while some need to share their personal vision with someone and find out what it feels like to acknowledge their soul’s deepest desires to another person. And there are others who come in with a need to learn to sort out what it means to work with soul, given the conditioning they’ve picked up about what life is and is about.
For all of them, there’s a suspicion that there’s more going on than they were taught. In every case, it’s evidence that the soul is trying in one way or another to break through the confines of the ego. In each of the stages there’s a component to this, as the grip of the ego operates on multiple levels. The healing work we do to allow the ego to take second chair to the soul happens in layers, and I recognize that a big portion of my work is to encourage people to have patience with the process as they crack through layer after layer, and still don’t feel they have the ultimate prize/destination. All resistance to the process is from the ego, as is all judgement about the ideas of speed and progress of the process.
Ego is a construct of defense mechanisms intended to guide us through the painful maze of life. Ego consists of a number of scripts we use to shield us from the harshness of the world. Healing the soul’s wounding involves releasing dependence on these scripts to the degree that soul can come forward and take the wheel.
Each of us is living with wounds to our souls. Evolutionary astrology aims to uncover that wounding and help people learn to heal themselves. In effect, evolutionary astrology is a tool to help you make nice with and learn to heal your soul. In my version of evolutionary astrology, this aim undergirds a belief that the more of us who release dependence on ego and heal the wounding of the soul, the less relevant the divisiveness we employ as defense mechanisms to keep us from each other. What’s the point of racism, colonialism, exploitation, slavery of any kind? What’s the use? Those of us consciously employing them are disconnected from soul, and those of us unconsciously supporting these modes are equally disconnected from soul.
Whatever healing at the soul level you do now, you’re actually working outside time. You’re traveling in time - did you know?! And it’s just this work outside time that is the key to healing anything in our own time. Real change in the world is the result of real change of individuals.
How much energy do you spend outside time?
How’s your relationship with soul developing?
Tom is available for consultations and lessons. See http://tdjacobs.com for more information and to book a consultation.
2 Responses to “Past Lives & Astrology: The Soul Knows No Time”
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August 18, 2007 By Tom Jacobs
August 21st, 2007 at 6:56 am
Great article, Tom, thank you. Coming into awareness of past lives is fascinating to me. I wish I could pinpoint moments when I have crossed over from not-knowing to knowing…alas it is very hard.
One day you are, the next you are not. Which I guess I have been subconsciously aware all along.
As for myself, I think that I fall into the last catagory: ‘Coming in with a need to learn to sort out what it means to work with the soul.’
I’ve a 9th House NN and Pluto, so there’s my indicator. In fact, this is something I have always been aware of in myself, and learning astrology merely provided another indicator!
August 24th, 2007 at 6:48 am
I got your email Tom, thank you! There is much to think about and consider. You’ll hear from me soon!