What inspired you to write this book at this time?
For the last 40 years as the spiritual director of the Kabbalah Centre I have spoken with many people who suffer personal challenges, trying to understand why certain things are happening to them. It is hard for them to accept the idea that a child can be born with a deformity, or why a business partner might have deceived, or worse, stolen from them. But once people begin to understand the doctrine of reincarnation, things begin to make sense. Somehow a burden is lifted. I see it in their eyes. I simply found that helping people to understand that there is a bigger context to life empowers them, they don’t feel like victims. By sharing this wisdom with people I can help them engage and experience life more fully, and with more meaning.
This is a 2-part question: 1. You wrote that the more elevated we become, the greater our challenges. Please define elevated. 2. Does this mean that people with seemingly steady lives such as Condoleezza Rice, and my cousin whom you’ve never heard of, have not had many incarnations?
There are several answers to this question. There is a spiritual system in this universe that resulted from the Creation of this world, I discuss this in the book; Spiritual energy exists in a polarity. Where you have light you have an equal amount of darkness, in this way we have free will and we can, with our choices, carve out our own destiny. However there is also a concept that I talk about which is the different level of souls, some are new souls who are coming down for the first time, some are older souls that have been here before. The work of each soul is different. Some have more challenges, but at the same time they have a greater capacity to reveal light from their decisions. It is also difficult for us to know what spiritual work a person needs to go through, or at what point in their life the challenge might come. We cannot assume anything about another’s life: We are only here to understand and work on our own. That in and of itself is difficult enough to understand we should not be involved with the work of another, that is between them and the Light.
If one believes in reincarnation, it’s not a stretch to think that people in our family and social circle have been with us before, but how can we tell what lessons we are to learn from each person this time around?
The work we are meant to do is usually found in our challenges, in those things we avoid, or run away from. For me the most difficult thing to learn was how to be alone. When my husband, teacher, friend, and partner in this spiritual work had a stroke, in many ways I was left to do this work alone. It is here that I found my greatest challenge, and also my greatest gift. 10, 20, or even 30 years ago I would that thought that my work was one thing. But in this, one of the most difficult things I have ever experienced , I learned something very different. We just never know what the Creator has in store for us. What we do need to know is that no matter what happens, no matter how hard life seems, our challenges only to bring us to become our best self.
We can feel it. When we feel that for no apparent reason we don’t like a person, or the opposite –we are drawn to a person— this is because we have known one anotherbefore. If you have no feelings, no understanding or thoughts, then perhaps this is a new connection. But in most cases, souls travel in circles.
If we go along with the idea that each soul chooses its family, do pets choose their owners? Did the turtles I had as a child learn something from me?
Choice is a relative term. Souls are given the environment that is best suited for them to grow, and achieve what they came to this world to learn. In this way yes, an animal will definitely find itself in a home where that spark has lessons to learn or payments to make.
You wrote that that we can gain insight into our purpose in this life by becoming aware of our tikkun, or astrological correction from past lives, and you include a chart so we can see what our tikkun is.
Our astrological chart is like a map or a blueprint of our souls work. We have clues there what gifts we were given because of the good choices we made in a past life, and we are challenged in the areas we might have failed in the past. On the astrological chart the north node points to our correction and the south node points to our past corrections. I include a chart and a reference to this for every sign in the book.
What’s your tikkun?
I was a Pisces in a past life: very sensitive and artistic. I came into this life to learn to be more structured, use more reason and be more independent and to speak my mind.
In the Angels section of your book, you present the notion that we can CREATE angels, and that there are positive and negative angels. How can we tell if we’ve created one of either type?
We simply need to know that we do. This universe is a dynamic spiritual infrastructure and every action, every word, every thought creates an energy field. There are angels that will use our positivity in our favor or our negativity against us.
You discuss non-human forms of incarnation such as rocks and plants and you say it’s possible to incarnate from human to one of the lower levels. What kinds of lesson do souls in these lower levels learn from their environments?
Yes we can incarnate into different forms, this is something I learned from the writings of the Ari, Rav Isaac Luria, one of the greatest kabbalists of all time. He discusses this concept in The Gates of Reincarnation and I quote from this work often in my book.
