My son spontaneously began doing those movements before going to bed one night - sitting in a lotus position, moving his arms in the air in circles.. I call it "mudra" the term for those movements, so every now and then we'll ask him to do his mudra - and he does all these elaborate movements with his hands, and arms,and then lays flat on the ground, gets up and shakes it out. He's 6 now, been doing it for 3 years. (but only after he's watched his sponge bob,to keep it in persepective.) If you're read "Flipside," then I'm repeating myself, but when he was 2 he told me he had been a monk in Nepal. Then one day, he was watching a Victoria's Secret model dancing on tv,looked at me and said "I want that!" I laughed and said "I thought you were a monk." He said "Not anymore!"
In Michael Newton's books he talks about the marriage or banding together of the spirit ego and the human ego to make a lifetime. Both terms to describe self awareness - consciousness. In western philosophy, or in our culture lets say, it's come to mean "Me." As in "you've got a big ego - you've got a big sense of yourself there." It came out of psychology - Freud and Jung used it quite a bit - so it's easy to say that the meaning gets cloudy depending on who you ask. The Indians, or ancient Indians anyway, talk about "atman" the individual self or the eternal soul - but as we can learn from NM (I'm taking to using Michael's initials backwards so I don't keep tying "Minute") there are two egos involved. (This place in my head is getting noisy!) I mention in a previous post this Latin phrase that came to me in a dream - vanum populatum - literally "annihilate vanity" - but Vanity is things of the ego that influence it (through fear, desire, other add ons) that don't have any inherent meaning. You can argue they come from past life experience, (karma) or you can suggest they come from a life choice which is dictated by beauty, or the desire to learn from being beautiful, or rich, or anything else that is not pure spirit. Buddhists like to define it by not defining it - or describing what it is not - and point out that the human condition is always changing - fluctuating, and that at our core is a spirit, more like a wisp of smoke - that travels from lifetime to lifetime. We know from Michael's research that's not the case - that our spirit between lives is fully conscious and capable of making free will decisions - but their philosophy holds up in terms of what is happening on a day to day basis. We get affected by desire and fear (turn off the tv and breathe) - we think we're always the same person, but we're ever changing, always growing. And as I like to point out to my Buddhist friends, we are also ever growing in the spirit world - never the same, as we continually grow spiritually, just at a much slower rate than can be measured in Earth terms (or at a great rate, for example by going through a tragedy). As one person put it in an LBL, "We can go through 5000 years of spiritual growth in one day on Earth, depending on the experience, as opposed to reincarnating on another planet where nothing of great drama or conflict occurs." So to answer your question - it's been debated for, oh, just about forever here on Earth, and for my mind, ego is not something to overcome - rather it's something to examine, understand, and be mindful of.
Just a quick comment - I interviewed a therapist in Colorado, she wasn't aware of NM's work, she had a client who met a guy who she felt was her soul mate, she left her husband, he didn't leave his wife - she was devastated. During her PLR she saw they had been together many lifetimes and had agreed NOT to be together now.. so they could learn and grow. There are many people in our soul group - NM says the average is 15 - so it could also be someone from there, or someone from an affiliate group you've had other lifetimes with. Honor the fact that you were born to meet your husband and if you examine it, you'll see the sacred in that original meeting - it's no coincidence or mistake you came together. (and of course people part, for many reasons, but that doesn't change the agreement you made to connect in this life). Scott de Tamble suggests a connection that defies logic, from a spirit level, may mean you're meant to become friends with this person - not on a physical level - but a spiritual one. Our energy has been around quite a bit, it makes sense we'd run into people we've been connected to before, or that we can communicate telepathically to. And the internet helps facilitate that, of course. In my session I was told "the people who know you will find you." But then, I think we can all communicate telepathically, we just don't practice it.
- Sometimes we walk around the sacred mountain, aren't aware we're doing it, and then later, we see benefits from it. I had the same answers in my council - although I didn't find their answer "You already know the answer to this question" negative. Rather it's a confirmation of your ability to intuit answers to deep questions. Take the ego out of the answer, as they say, and see it for what it is. You do know why you're in Kentucky once you examine it - and the lives you've touched. (there's no choice of place on the planet that can be a negative.) You do know the answers to these questions, and they know you know the answers, and are trying to tell you to trust yourself a little more. Your daughter's spirit guide is her own, yours is your own, I should probably scan thru the answers before replying, someone else has probably mentioned it. Everyone gets their own. And if you're fortunate enough to eventually become a spirit guide, you'll get one too. 16 lives is a few lives? When you consider that you might have paused between them (sometimes its hundreds of years between lives) that would put you back quite a bit - and would account for the darker color (older color) of your spirit. But some people are here for the first time - its pretty funny that you would be chagrined at being here so many rich and wonderful times. Couple of observations - listen to the tape again. Usually our conscious mind takes over and spends a bit of time talking us out of it - "must have made it up" or "I didn't really go anywhere" - Then when you're making up your list of questions, try to ask some that you know for a fact you know nothing about. Or ask your facilitator to go deeper and ask specific questions - in my case, I asked both of my facilitators for each session for names, dates, cities, and to not let me get away with dodging the question. When you've made such a long journey back, and assembled your team to be present and available to answer your deepest questions - well, I had ten questions I'd ask God if I got to him. Sure, I got a few "You already know that answer" answers, but that didn't prevent me from asking them. I'll give you an example. I asked "What's the meaning of Vanum Populatum?" It came to me in a dream, I had googled the answer, but I knew that no one outside of me would know the answer to the question. So when I asked, my lead council member showed me an imagine of ME lying on a couch, sitting next to my facilitator. And with a point of his thumb, he said "Richard already knows the answer to that." I laughed. But in that answer, I learned a couple of things: 1. He could have said "You already know the answer to that," but didn't - confirming that he was addressing my eternal self, and that my latest temporary self, Richard, was on the couch. And the second thing I learned, was that I saw that it was my eternal self who had whispered "Vanum Populatum" in my ear two years previously, knowing that I love puzzles, that I would google the term eventually, and be startled by the answer.
- It means "Destroy Vanity." I wondered who would be telling me to do that - I hadn't heard of Michael's work at this point - I thought "Why would someone speak to me in Latin, a language I don't know?" and "Why would someone tell me to destroy vanity, when I live in LA and I wouldn't know where to begin?" But then I realized it was close to the Buddhist "Destroy the ego," or "destroy the self" through meditation on emptiness - but I saw it more clearly as "destroy the things of the self that have no meaning but are all vanity" - money, fame, looks, etc. So I was startled and puzzled as to who had whispered that in my ear - and in the council session, I saw that it was my eternal self (that clever fellow) who had put into motion a 3D puzzle that would only be solved two years later, after I'd discovered Michael's work, after I'd flown to Chicago to interview him, and during my LBL session where I would see clearly how that puzzled had been laid out in advance. I got quite a chuckle out of the council over it... and the answer "You already know the answer to that question" becomes more deep and profound the more you meditate on it. And it may not come to you today, or in your session, but the seeds for those answers have been planted in you, and they will surely come to bloom.