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Earthly Cycles: How Past Lives and
Soul Patterns Shape Your Life

You were not born a blank slate—your life is shaped by past lives and by soul patterns chosen by your higher self. In Earthly Cycles, Alexander offers a richly detailed exploration of the cycles of birth, death, and reincarnation, illuminating the hidden influences on your life. Areas covered include soul qualities and family of consciousness; choosing your parents; soul ages; life themes; sexual orientation; the laws of karma; angels and spirit guides.

Robert F. Butts (husband and collaborator of Jane Roberts, author of the Seth Material), wrote in the Foreword: "From a number of perspectives [Alexander] takes us on a very rich, in-depth exploration of the ancient yet always new and challenging reincarnational process…Alexander gives fresh insights into what is probably the oldest, most basic set of questions we mortals struggle with."

ORDER here.

Introduction

All spiritual traditions born of deep wisdom include the understanding that an immortal soul transcends the death of its physical body. Some traditions maintain that a soul enjoys only one human journey, while others propose a cycle of continual death and rebirth gradually leading toward the soul's perfection. The western spiritual tradition, carried in Judaism and Christianity, holds to the soul's single life journey. As a result, westerners intrigued by the concept of reincarnation must look outside their native culture for wisdom on the subject.

Ours is not the first text to discussion reincarnation and karma, nor will it be the last. It is our intent, however, that these deep mysteries be explained to you through words and ideas which respect your intellectual and spiritual maturation, freeing you from digging through the artifacts of cultures past and struggling to make them come live in terms consonant with modern understanding. If you will, this book is a "revised version" of a body of ancient, indeed eternal, knowledge, offered to illuminate the deeper influences on your life, the better to help you navigate the crests and troughs of your journey through the earthly cycles.

Families of Consciousness

Just as your life grows as a unique offshoot of your higher self, so is your higher self itself an offshoot of a still greater body of consciousness. This is the level of "families of consciousness," vast fields of intent dividing the host human consciousness into the broad themes of human life. Each family of consciousness plays a role in the organization, operation, cultural evolution, and stability of human society.

A family of consciousness colors all of its higher-self progeny with its thematic tone, and therefore similarly imbues all incarnations flowing from that higher self. This is the basic bedrock foundation of the psyche, atop which are layered the more malleable and variable aspects such as soul age, soul aspect, sex, and so on. One's family of consciousness it eh immutable cornerstone of the psyche carried from lifetime to lifetime.

Sexual Orientation

Sex serves a dual purpose unique to the human species: it liberates you from sharp self-identification with your body and ego, restoring you temporarily to oceanic cosmic oneness; and it promotes an intensely powerful exchange of life information with your partner. The first helps to balance the dangerous potentials of reason and ego, while the second ensures a continual blending of life energies, the better to build bridges of shared experience between partners.

These two fundamental purposes of sex—temporary dissolution of self-identity and exchange of life information—are fulfilled in any sexual encounter regardless of the partners' genders. Beneath these overarching motivations for sex fall categories of heterosexual, homosexual, and bisexual, each with its own purpose.

Each person carries male and female energies, in most cases strongly skewed toward one's biological gender. Thus, each person carries a "primary" gender and a "secondary" gender, with the primary gender a reflection of anatomy. Because the primary gender so dominates, with the secondary field its weak shadow, and because nature always seeks balance between unequal fields, the heterosexual psyche is in a state of constant tension. it suffers imbalance, yet it is unable to restore equilibrium by drawing on its own resources; it must seek out and incorporate energies from an external source carrying the attenuated secondary energy. Male seeks female, female seeks male, in a dance of imbalanced psyches seeking wholeness. The essence of heterosexuality, on a metaphysical level, is the search for balance, unity, and wholeness through union with others.

The homosexual psyche is fundamentally different from the heterosexual. As a rule, it is far more balanced and whole, with a relatively equal blending of male and female energies. As always, the balance will be skewed toward anatomical gender, but much less so than among heterosexuals. The drive toward sexual union is just as strong in homosexuals, for it arises from sexuality's higher purpose, but the impetus of that drive is no longer the relief of imbalance.

Homosexuals tend to cluster in the families of consciousness most attuned to the zeitgeist and social trends, and are particularly involved in pulling society forward on its sometimes begrudging evolutionary path. Thus, a large proportion of homosexuals are offshoots of the Agitator and Innovator families, both devoted to breaking up anachronistic social structures and breathing fresh, innovative ideas into the stale gloom of tradition. (As an aside, this explains the heavy involvement of homosexuals in the arts.)

The Life Hypothesis

All beings are impressed into the earth system with the same hypothesis: Can this creature find fulfillment of its potentials given present earth conditions? Because humanity is unique in its drive to build complex cultural, technological, and artistic expressions of its consciousness, and because the blending of soul attributes promotes rich diversity of personhood, the hypothesis rises above simple physical survival and embraces high culture as well. Mere "fulfillment" expands to human "happiness," the interwoven strands of work, play, family, and community that contribute to deep contentment and the ineffable satisfaction of a life well lived.

Your life is a hypothesis. You are the "(Your Name) Hypothesis." Your higher self has cast your unique bundle of soul attributes into late twentieth-century western culture, there to struggle past roadblocks, driven by a private yearning, reaching toward highest happiness. Is that happiness within your grasp? Is it light years distant? Is it achievable given more determined effort?

When you consider your own life, your driving motivates, your challenges and roadblocks, the ideal life circumstances certain to bring you happiness, you are consciously contemplating your higher self's hypothesis when it sculpted your life parameters. Your higher self hovers above you, absorbing the unfolding events of your life, awaiting in high anticipation the answer to its hypothesis: Can this lifetime find happiness?

Releasing Karma

If the overall purpose of participating in the earthly system is to gradually grow toward the refined wisdom of old souls, and to release all binding relationships along the path, then reincarnation becomes a necessity simply because it is not always possible to heal all karmic braids entwined within a lifetime. The act of murder, most obviously, can never be expiated within the murderer's lifetime, since the victim is not available to receive healing restoration. Such a karmic debt can only be resolved by recasting it into subsequent lifetimes.

It is important to note that the healing of karma bears no resemblance to the biblical approach to crime: "an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth." To answer abuse with retaliatory abuse merely escalates an exchange through expanding loops further entwining two souls, requiring that much more future time and energy to heal and release. Erasing karma does not mean balancing it by the victim's visiting equal suffering upon the perpetrator, but by the perpetrator offering sufficient healing and compensatory energy to the victim that the overall balance lands in the "positive" column, releasing the karmic braid.

As the soul grows in wisdom, it learns two essential facts: it is best not to create any karmic braids in the first place; and when karma grows between two souls, it is healed not by inviting compensating abuse from the victim but by the perpetrator offering healing energy of an intensity equal to or greater than the intensity of the initial assault. The ball is in the perpetrator's court, and only he can return a volley of healing, restorative energy unraveling the braid.