THE ROOM

I'm good at thinking outside the box, so much that you realize it's not a box to begin with.

will.i.am

Dark ... quiet ... peaceful ... but the awareness of an imminent transition gets stronger and stronger. There is in this darkness the knowledge and experience of a thousand lifetimes. Yet the longing for another chance to learn more about bottling the ego, controlling addictions, and getting closer to being a spirit of pure light helped make the decision to do another lifetime with a body. The importance of these physical existences for ones spiritual evolution cannot be overstated. How difficult, how frustrating and how painful these incarnations can be is clear, but the power of a mortal existence to indelibly imprint important spiritual attributes is even clearer.

Lucky, how really lucky to have been put at the front of the line to do an embodied existence on the beautiful planet called Earth. What will be experienced this time? Will the lessons that poverty has to teach be available, or will it be the even more challenging role of a wealthy person? What if bad choices are made? What if it's hard to even remember what lessons are to be learned? What if ... oooohhh, the pressure is getting intense. Wave after wave keeps pushing toward an imminent transition. Noise ... commotion ... light ... OWWW! A vicious slap on the butt and the transition is complete. Here at last – here at University Earth.

* * *

As a child is born into the world and comes into his mother's arms, it soon becomes evident that this sweet tiny creature has a definite personality that he seems to have brought with him. Those parents with more than one child know that children from the same genetic pool can have very definite differences in personality traits and attitudes. One child may be quiet and low maintenance except for his extreme stubbornness. Another may be the child that must always have her own way and later becomes someone who likes to be the boss of everything. Yet they all grew up in the same household with very similar upbringings. So there must be some sort of personality-defining energy, spirit or genetics that come with children on the day they are born. Some scientists believe that personality traits are passed genetically. With the huge amount of genetic material and all the possibilities for making proteins, we have discovered only a few over 25,000 peptides (small proteins) that appear to be encoded in our DNA. Perhaps some of these traits we seem to bring with us are passed in some way through this "unused" genetic material. Many religious beliefs and spiritual traditions include possibilities of pre-mortal existences or past lives (often referred to as incarnations). Some even believe that we have lived, or are living simultaneously, many lives and that we bring to each embodied existence all that we have learned from these earlier or concomitant periods of learning.

At the moment of birth the great forgetting begins, and all the knowledge and experience the new human being has brought with him begins to fade from memory. This great forgetting will make possible a much greater level of spiritual growth since only the strongest character traits will be likely to exert an influence on the new Earthling. If ego has been dealt with well in other existences, it will be an asset for the child as it starts on its path. If patience was never learned, it may cause problems in this existence and may even be the main reason for coming here this time. Any strengths achieved prior to this incarnation (a lifetime with a body) will be helpful during this one.

As the child grows, every experience, large or small, in some way affects what the child has brought with him to form a somewhat different child by the end of each day. What he experiences in his environment and his reactions to these experiences will create subtle changes from week to week. At any point in one's life, the totality of his experiences can be considered to be that person's "vector sum" (explained in the next paragraph). Thus a person can evolve in many different directions from any point in his life depending on what comes into his environment, what he experiences, and how he reacts to those experiences from that particular point on.

In physics we learn that a vector is a certain force acting in a particular direction. It was often explained using the horses and wagon image. If five horses are pulling a wagon directly north and three are pulling it directly east, the wagon will go approximately NNE at about a four-horse rate. In actuality, the wagon will probably break into many pieces and the horses will run off never to be seen again – but you learn that later in your physics class. There can be many vectors acting upon an object at any one time and the resulting course and force will be determined by mathematically finding the sum of all these vectors, i.e. – the vector sum.

Depending on our age, our lives have been acted upon by thousands to millions of forces pushing us in many directions. Our parents, families and societies create extremely strong vectors in directions mirroring our social environment. Religious organizations tend to create very powerful forces in our lives that can overpower many other forces. Our peers, especially our close friends, can often carry us further in the directions given to us by society and religion, or they can help create counter vectors in amazingly different directions. There are many points in our lives where a course of events will cause us to closely examine the place to which our own personal vector sum has brought us. Catastrophic events such as illness, significant loss, natural disasters or wars can change our evolutionary paths forever, but so can the accumulation of new insights, personal interactions, strong emotional experiences, and subtle chemical and energy influences.

Absolutism, as used in this book, is the existence of all-this-way-or-that-way thought processes that limit our range of experiences, insights or personal interactions by holding us within preconceived boundaries. These boundaries of thought and experience are usually created for us by other people in our environment: family members, friends, governing officials, religious leaders, schoolteachers and those who create our entertainment. Strangely enough, these people are usually only passing on that which was given to them. Rarely are these limiting ideas examined and even more rarely are they challenged before being handed down. These ideas are...