Phobias, Disorders and Autism: A Reincarnational Perspective
How and why do past life experiences echo in this life?
For years I’ve had a phobia that causes me to panic when I’m in enclosed spaces. A couple of times I’ve been on a train in London’s underground, tightly crammed shoulder to shoulder during the morning commuter peak, and felt I was suffocating. I had to get off at the next station to calm down, then wait for the commuter peak to pass before getting back on.
Phobias are common. A friend is creeped out by spiders, not being able to stay in a room where a spider is lurking.
And I recently learned from a fellow meditator that she had a period of five years when she couldn’t leave the house. She was married, with three children, and one day she opened the door to go outside but couldn’t cross the threshold. She could function perfectly normally inside the house, but her husband had to do all the food shopping and transport the children. Her phobia ended equally arbitrarily. One day she decided the situation was crazy, that there was no reason she couldn’t go outside, so she stepped across the threshold and has happily gone about daily life ever since.
Phobias are psychological traits that limit our behaviour. They seem to be present arbitrarily. But I don’t think they are. For my fellow meditator, remaining inside the house became a profound learning experience. She started reading, which she had never found time for previously. And friends brought fascinating people to her. Reading and meeting knowledgeable visitors resulted in her developing a deepened sense of her spiritual nature. External limitation brought inner freedom.
With respect to my claustrophobia, I learned via dreams and an intense meditation session that some time during the Middle Ages I challenged the local authorities too loudly, and they punished me by locking me in a metal cage. The cage was too small to stand or even sit in. It was designed so whoever was in it had to fold their arms and legs into a crammed ball. I was left there until I died.
So my claustrophobia is the result of a traumatic past life event. On one level being claustrophic in this life gives me an opportunity to work on dissolving my feelings around that event. On a deeper level, remembering what happened to me has helped me understand how reincarnation functions psychospiritually, how our emotional response to one powerful life event resonates down through our subsequent lives.
In my case I am dealing with a phobia. But many people have variations on phobias. I’m thinking of food allergies and autism spectrum disorder. Like phobias, they are widespread, with it now being suggested that a sizeable portion of the world population lives on the spectrum.
Wondering about all this led me to ask my guides the following question:
What is behind phobias, food allergies, autism and learning disorders? They appear to be on the rise as a proportion of population. Is there a reason for this? I am curious whether it’s related to the growing population. The population was four billion in 1974. Now it’s double that. Are people reincarnating so quickly, and the conditions of modern life changing so rapidly, that they’re reacting negatively to it? Or is it deeper than that? Are reincarnational issues involved?
The guides answer:
Each time you incarnate you have a choice as to which positive and negative traits existing in your accumulated human identity you will draw on and engage in your upcoming life. The full range of choices is complex, as are the reasons you choose the ones you do.
One of the chief criteria for choosing to address a certain group of traits is opportunity. You need a suitable social environment to explore certain traits. You can’t develop horticultural skills if you are born into a desert and have no way of escaping to lands where gardens are cultivated. You need a suitable environment to explore specific skills and traits.
This is the case with people who are presenting various learning disorders, food allergies, phobias and degrees of autism. There currently exists a supportive cultural environment where careers as educationalists and psychologists have become possible. Such careers were not possible in previous centuries and cultures. The upshot is that a culture of psychological diagnosis and treatment has developed in which people are gaining the expertise to recognise phobias and disorders and are learning how to treat them.
As a result there is currently a supportive social environment in which individuals can address the self-limiting psychological traits that have developed out of their responses to experiences in previous lives. So the rise in the incidence of individuals presenting with phobias and disorders is due to pragmatic opportunism.
Those who are presenting phobias and learning disorders today will have held back addressing those issues until a suitable family and social environment became available. In the distant past, when people lived in villages, it was the shaman or medicine man or woman who had the role of diagnosing and treating psychological ailments. Of course, they lacked current psychological knowledge. However, they did have, and shamans today continue to have, their own kinds of expertise. Part of that expertise involves being able to draw on knowledge of human psychology that they developed in previous lives.
Today the world’s population has increased and people have migrated from villages to cities. In this environment there is no official role for shamans, their roles having been replaced by psychologists, teachers, doctors, and so on. Individuals who have an innate bent towards nurturing and curing people, who in the past took on the roles of shaman and medicine man or woman, are currently incarnating as educationalists, social workers, psychologists and so on.
This is the flip side of those who have incarnated in order to work through their phobias and disorders: those who have developed skills as curers have simultaneously incarnated to assist them. It is a pragmatic solution, with each side having the opportunity to experience and learn what they need in order to keep developing.
Why do so many people possess phobias and similar traits that require treatment?
To answer that question we need to go back many thousands of years. When human beings lived in small villages or nomadic tribal groups, disagreements sometimes occurred between individuals. Occasionally a domineering person attempted to take over the group, or actually did so, to the distress of others. But in general those living in small groups worked out their disputes without much trauma.
This social situation began to change during the Bronze Age. People in areas with growing populations came together to live in towns. Some towns grew into cities. Large populations developed the specialist roles of bakers, potters, weavers, farmers, soldiers, and so forth. Cities also needed rules, and people to enforce the rules. As a result classes of people formed: workers, soldiers, priests, an aristocratic elite, and kings.
Kings inevitably wanted more territory, and the materials available in other territories, so armies were formed, battles fought, and the beaten peoples were enslaved. Large numbers of people were coerced. Many were imprisoned, tortured, executed. As a result, huge swathes of populations were negatively impacted. Ongoing wars continue to have a similar impact on millions today.
Every individual alive today has been tormented, and very possibly has tormented others, during their past incarnations. For millennia violence has been woven into the fabric of human interactions. Individuals have watched their families die, have died themselves from violence or famine, been locked up, tortured, raped, and treated harshly and with casual indifference by those in a position to inflict physical and psychological harm.
As a result, everyone has had negative experiences. Reacting to these experiences has resulted in intensely felt, debilitating, psychological traits: suspicion; deep-seated fears; tendencies to strike out, turn away or withdraw; profound discomfort with sexuality; and the whole raft of phobias and disorders that people develop.
Where do phobias and disorders come from?
Phobias generally have their origins in particular incidents. For example, if you have a phobia regarding spiders, and no incident stands out from your childhood that could have caused that reaction, if you just react instinctively against their presence, it is very possible that you had extensive negative experiences with them in a prior life. For example, you may have been locked up in a prison cell full of spiders for years, often felt them on you, even woken with spider webs draped across you. It is understandable that after such an experience an individual would become phobic towards spiders.
Other phobias are more layered. For example, many individuals are instinctively offended by sexist behaviour. Again, if that response doesn’t originate in earlier life experiences, past life experiences are likely to be the cause.
In the case of being averse to manifestations of sexism, it may be that the individual was the victim of sexism in a previous life to such a degree that the resentment, suspicion or anger that rose in them in reaction shaped that life’s personality and subsequently was uploaded to the individual’s accumulated human identity. They are manifesting their emotional reaction again this time round so it may be worked on. Alternatively, the individual may have been highly sexist in a prior life and so is now seeking to counter that imbalance, which makes them sensitive to others’ sexist behaviour and attitudes.
Disorders are more complex. Where phobias generally hinge on a single issue, disorders involve compensatory behaviours that work on two or more levels and so require some unpacking.
For example, learning disorders may involve issues with authority. The individual may have been coerced in a previous life, either by an overbearing individual or through an excessive regimentation of their life, and now they are unwilling to submit themselves either to others or to an ordered environment.
Autistic children who seek to create order are trying to live within their own order so they don’t need to live according to someone else’s.
On the other hand, an individual with autism could be deflecting their own attention from a deep-seated issue they are having difficulty addressing, but they need to deal with the deflecting psychological attitudes before they can address the core issue. There are many possibilities.
As a result, disorders are difficult to get to the bottom of and so address. Many well-meaning people attempt to do so today using chemical inputs to modify behaviour. This should always be a last resort. It is like having a boil. Suppressing the symptoms doesn’t make the boil go away. Sometimes the boil has to be lanced and things have to get messy before progress is made. Learning how to delve into past life issues will definitely aid those who are attempting to understand and treat deep-seated disorders.
Everyone has disorders of some kind. It is just that most people manage to remain functional. But sometimes people go off the rails and do something horrible that shocks those who thought they knew them. They behave in this manner because some powerful emotional attitude burst up from their depths and they weren’t able to contain it. Usually this is because they had been attempting to suppress what lay behind their feelings rather than acknowledge and address it. Bubbling magma can only be suppressed for so long before it overflows.
This is why whenever you feel a powerful negative reaction we suggest you make note of it and, when the time is right, delve into it. Some kind of psychological issue will lie at the bottom of it. It likely won’t be powerful enough to drive you off the deep end, but if it is present in your personality it is there for a reason: because your spiritual self wants to use this life to address it. We recommend you do so.
In advising this we are not suggesting you walk around with your disorder on your sleeve. It is a personal and not a public matter. Talk to yourself via your journal. Or join a group that facilitates personal reflection. Certainly utilise a process of self-enquiry. Identify what is churning away inside you, how it manifests, what lies at the heart of it, and replace it with positive feelings, thoughts and behaviour.
A final observation
If you have a child or close family member who is working though autism, food phobias or learning disorders, try to see the big picture. It is a useful opportunity for you to help another by expressing your love and support. But it is also an opportunity to develop understanding, to look behind your loved one’s external behaviours and come to appreciate their deeper causes.
There is no need to share what you know with the conflicted person. What we are suggesting is entirely for your own education. If you are able to learn what is driving their behaviour, you will not only be personally edified, you will be in a more informed position to help them. In later years, and depending on circumstances, you may even be able to share at least some of what you have learned.
Naturally, that is a matter of personal judgement. And, as we said, that is not the primary purpose of engaging in deep enquiry. It is for your own education regarding the nature of being human.
This material is drawn from a series of three books in which the guides answer questions regarding the nature of our existence. They may be purchased from any online store. Excerpts may be read in other essays I have published on Medium and on the website of Attar Books, www.attarbooks.com
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