Reincarnation
Are two of me here?
In a talk I recently gave about reincarnation I was asked if human beings can incarnate into two bodies at the same time.
Specifically, I was asked: “Could two of me be walking around on this planet, right now? And what would happen if I met that other me?”
Great questions. Of course, I didn’t have an answer. But I did remember a relevant insight from hypnotherapist Michael Newton. Some of his clients, while under hypnosis, remembered not just past lives but what they experienced between lives. Through this process Newton learned that when we incarnate we only send a percentage of our spiritual identity into the body we have chosen to incarnate into.
If this is so, it means that not all of each of us is in actually our current body. Which implies we could certainly occupy two bodies at the same time. In theory. But does this actually happen?
The guides I communicate with — human beings who have completed their incarnation cycle — offered the following insights into this issue.
Is all of me here right now?
To begin, we agree that, yes, not all of your spiritual you, by which we mean your full identity at the spiritual level, is present within your current human personality. But we must emphasise that the human situation is complex, and there is no one-size-fits-all explanation.
We have previously offered a model in which the incarnated human identity consists of five layers we labelled selves: the biological self, the socially formed self, the higher human self, the energetic self, and the spiritual self. In response to the question, we can say that your spiritual self consists of only a portion of your full spiritual identity. Generally this is between 20% and 80%. Why such a difference? This is where individual cases need to be considered.
Let’s say you have had a series of tough lives, in which you previously went through difficult situations. Or you may be in a tender state internally, and to rebuild your confidence you need to take it easy for a period during your next incarnation. In each case, what is needed is a minimally stressful life. For the first person, who has previously had to deal with tough situations, low stress helps them absorb tough life lessons. For the second, who for whatever reason is inwardly tender, a low stress life gives them time to get their breath back, so to speak, to regather their wits and enthusiasm.
In these two cases an undemanding life is selected, involving minimal problems. The individuals concerned may decide they only need to utilise 20% or 30% of their full spiritual identity.
Alternatively, someone who has selected a tough life for themselves, involving extreme encounters, may choose to send down 50% or 60% of themselves. This is because they expect to be severely tested and want to be able to draw directly on their prior experience so they can successfully deal with the demands.
Do people sometimes send down too little or too much of their spiritual identity?
Yes. In the case of having too little presence, when faced with difficult situations individuals may end up getting overwhelmed and not be up to doing what they planned.
In the case of someone who sends too much of their full spiritual identity, they may end up not being challenged as much as they intended, and so don’t test parts of themselves in the ways they planned. They may even end up feeling somewhat bored.
The reason for this is that at the level of your spiritual self you possess a great deal of experience and knowledge. Having access to more of this store means your human you is able to come up with work-arounds when faced with awkward situations. So rather than going into a problem, working through it, and coming out the other side feeling more experienced and wiser, you have the savvy to sidestep the problem and work around it.
How do we decide how much of our spiritual identity we should send down into a body?
Initially, individuals are given advice. But once they reach the teen stage of their incarnational cycle the decision is left to them. Their experience then becomes their guide. Individuals can overestimate their capability. But as we just explained, they don’t do so repeatedly as it messes up their life and becomes counterproductive.
The art of incarnating involves learning to balance the difficulty of the challenges you line up for yourself with the psychospiritual resources you select for that life — because you don’t just select a certain percentage of spiritual presence, you also select a range of positive and limiting psychological traits, all of which you draw on to grapple with life situations.
Different lives present different problems so require different resources. That is why we say no one-size-fits-all formula suits everyone’s lives.
Does anyone send 100% of their spiritual presence into a body?
No. Several factors account for this. One is that the human body’s nervous system isn’t capable of energetically containing all your spiritual you. The two vibrations exist on very different levels, with the physical body being on a much coarser, cruder level than your spiritual part. This disparity becomes even greater as your spiritual identity evolves.
When you begin your incarnational cycle your spiritual identity is inexperienced. It has limited personal resources. By the time you have undergone a thousand incarnations, when you are reaching the end of your cycle, this situation has changed considerably. You are more experienced, you have developed numerous abilities, you know intimately how the human domain functions, and you can calmly cope with anything human life throws at you. You are innately more knowing and more loving. You have become wise.
To offer a final observation on this issue of proportion, we would say that the balance between the percentage of spiritual presence you inject into your incarnated self and the percentage you choose to remain in a non-embodied state also impacts on the degree to which you feel grounded in your human identity. By grounded we mean spiritually grounded.
Could you give some examples?
When an individual first starts their incarnation cycle, if they send 70% of their spiritual presence into their incarnated self, and due to inexperience feel overwhelmed by their life circumstances, their spiritual self, which is buried down within them, is also overwhelmed. Because a high percentage of their spiritual presence is present in their human self, yet is inaccessible, they would likely feel highly destabilised. In effect, they would have little non-embodied spiritual presence to call on, and that little is inexperienced and so unable to help much even if it could come to their aid.
But if the same individual sent just 20% of their spiritual presence to live that same life, then they retain 80% of their spiritual presence to provide support and soothing assistance from outside their incarnated self. In such a case, the non-embodied 80% is better able to help the embodied 20% cope than, for another individual, their non-embodied 30% is able to help their embodied 70% cope.
This is simplistic maths, but it offers a reasonable account for why an inexperienced identity normally sends a lesser percentage of its overall vibration into a body.
In contrast, a very experienced individual may choose to send 60% of their spiritual presence into their incarnated self, because they have developed the skill to access the resources of their embodied spiritual self. Calling on those inner resources is likely to be part of how they are testing themselves in that life.
On the other hand, another equally experienced individual may choose to send down only 40%, because they are working on establishing a bridge between their human awareness and their spiritual identity and want to have a high percentage of their non-embodied spiritual self available to call on. As can be seen, there are many reasons why no one sends all of their spiritual presence into a body.
To summarise, no human bodies, as they are currently constituted, are able to contain all the energy of your spiritual presence.
Yet, given the limitations of the human cognitive system, why would anyone want to? If they sent a high percentage of their spiritual presence into a body, much of it would remain under-utilised. To depict the situation light-heartedly, your spiritual you would be seated inside your human you, twiddling its thumbs. The situation would be a waste of your deepest resources.
Okay. Then how about living two lives simultaneously? Do people do that?
Before we can answer, we need to make another point regarding what your non-embodied portion gets up to while a percentage of it forms part of your embodied identity.
Usually, your non-embodied portion is focused on the same issues you are, but from the other end of the stick, so to speak. For example, while you are learning to meditate, your non-embodied portion will be learning related skills, including how to better communicate with your human you. This involves learning to pass on information via dreams and during the heightened states of awareness you enter while meditating.
For you in a human body, skill-building involves directing your awareness up into the spiritual realm, while on the spiritual level it involves learning to communicate down, into your human you. Note that up and down are metaphors, because the physical and spiritual exist in parallel, inter-penetrating one another. They do not exist in a hierarchical relationship.
Some of what your non-embodied spiritual identity does while you are in a body may also involve non-human activities that have nothing to do with your incarnated state. These may be adventures in other parts of the spiritual realm. Here we get to your question.
Simultaneous incarnation may occur on this planet. It may even involve incarnation on another planet. Neither happens frequently. But when it does occur it is generally because those individuals like to challenge themselves more than is normal, due to possessing more energy, or just having more derring do. Accordingly, they try balancing multiple activities at once.
Other individuals are naturally more circumspect and wouldn’t dream of attempting so much at once. It is all a matter of choice. Of course, those who attempt more are also more likely to crash and burn. It is certainly possible to screw up a life by not giving it sufficient attention because you’re focused on something else. But those who fall over also tend to have a greater propensity than is usual to pick themselves up, dust off, and carry on.
So what happens when a single spiritual identity sends portions of itself into two bodies on this planet? Will they meet? If so, what happens?
It’s possible they could meet. But highly unlikely. As we just stated, the point of incarnating in two bodies at once is for the individual to test themselves, to stretch their resources, and to see how they cope. The point is to build their capabilities. Meeting themselves is not the point.
Accordingly, they will choose bodies and lives that don’t intersect. If by some chance coincidence they do meet, there will likely be no more than a flicker of recognition, then they move on. This is an issue that it is impossible to generalise about. While anything is possible in theory, that doesn’t mean it will actually happen. This applies in the spiritual realm as well as the physical realm.
We are conscious of not having fully answered the last part of your question, but there are limits to what can be explained using current ideas and vocabulary.
What we offer here must be considered only an introduction to the topic, because it is another complex facet of human existence. Not everyone needs or comes to understand these matters. In part, this is because you don’t need to know such things to satisfactorily live a life. More significantly, few want to know.
For those who do find such matters intriguing, more information is released on a need to know basis. As you dig into the circumstances of your life, and as you enter into your own awareness, you will find you lack the knowledge you need to understand what is happening to you and in you. At that time, more knowledge will become available.
As is said, knock and the door will be opened. It is entirely over to you what you learn and how far your personal store of wisdom expands.
The guides’ answers are excerpted from a book, Where Do I Go When I Meditate?, one of a series of three, each of which consists of 21 questions and answers. Together they cover an extensive range of human psychospiritual experience. They may be viewed on online bookstores and at www.attarbooks.com.
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